Secrets of editing revealed

The secret to editing is to ask questions so obvious as to make you appear slow-witted. 

These are the questions to ask when you are doing structural editing or macro-editing. The micro-editing (fact checking, spelling, punctuation, grammar, English usage, house style) is on hold until the big questions have been addressed. 

What's it about?

This is the focus question. The story, no matter how many subsidiary points it contains, must have one single, identifiable main point. If you can't state that main point in a single sentence, then there isn't one, and it's time to go back and rethink what the story is. 

Where's the point?

This is related to the focus. The story needs to get to the point quickly, without throat-clearing and background baggage, if the reader can be expected to engage further. That means you have two or three sentences to get there. (Think how long you read something before deciding to move on.) 

What happened yesterday? 

This is the chronology question. Typically, in a news story, the most recent event appears first, with the background filled in subsequently. But it includes the larger point of organization. Is the sequence of events clear? If the story shifts from the past to the present, or back and forth, does it provide transitions to keep the reader oriented? 

How do we know this?

This is the source question. How many sources are there in this story? Just one? Uh-oh. More? Who or what are they? Where do they come from? How reliable are they? What do they stand to gain or lose? Are there other sources that should be consulted? 

Who benefits?

Chances are good that someone in the story will wind up looking good and someone else will wind up looking less than good. Have both the parties been treated fairly (their positions explained, with an opportunity to respond)? Or is there a thumb on the scales to favor someone?

What do you mean here?

When you come across a sentence so muddy as to defy comprehension, it is time to turn to the writer and say, "I'm not quite clear what you mean here? Can you tell me what you meant to say?" The writer will typically utter a sentence that makes sense, and you say, "Oh, let's just write that."

Who's the reader?

Your source(s) should not be the reader, unless you are just currying favor. Is there specialized information or jargon that must be explained? How much background information is the reader likely to need? What level of sophistication in language (vocabulary, sentence structure) is appropriate? 

Why is this a story?

A story is written and published to have a consequence. Does this one have one? If it is about an event, what is the actual or potential consequence? If it is a profile, is the subject significant in some way? If it is meant simply to entertain, is it entertaining? 

Have you kept your balance?

As an editor, you are at the intersection of the interests of a number of parties: the writer, the publication, the reader. And there is [cough] your own personal and professional integrity. Have you dealt fairly with all the parties?

Are you sure you want to do this?

Mike Waller, former publisher of The Baltimore Sun, said that this is the most important question an editor can ever raise. This is the question that might spare you a libel suit. This question might spare you publication of a defective story (plagiarized? fabricated?) that will stain your reputation. And it has a secondary question:

Are you really sure?

 

It's a grand day for grammar

 In the fifth through eighth grades, I was drilled in the traditional schoolroom grammar by two formidable ladies, Mrs. Jessie Perkins and Mrs. Elizabeth Craig, and while their results with other students were variable, what they taught me stuck. 

Over years as an editor it was brought home to me that the schoolroom grammar was seriously flawed. Originally developed to apply Latin grammar to English, a bad fit because the two languages operate on different principles, but Latin was the prestige language when English was the new kid on the block. Over the centuries that grammar was distorted by an accretion of arbitrary rules and superstitions that have been exposed by linguists. But those of us who had the schoolroom grammar had little or no contact with the linguists. 

Now we can. The Truth About English Grammar by Geoffrey K. Pullum, has just been published in this country by Polity Press. Pullum, the distinguished linguist and co-author of The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language, speaks not as the scribes and Pharisees but as one who has authority, and bridges the gap between the traditional grammar and current linguists in a short, concise book accessible to any reader willing to put in a little time. 

He will expect you to learn some new terms for categories, such as determinative, a class that includes the definite and indefinite articles; this and that, sometimes called demonstratives; words such as all, any, both, each, either, every, few, many, no, several, and some; and all the numbers, a category he calls "gigantic." A determinative generally precedes a noun, but sometimes can stand alone, as in "Some like it hot."

He says our understanding of prepositions is muddled because grammarians understood prepositions to be only pre-positioned, standing directly in front of a noun. But words like down and up, traditionally identified as adverbs, actually function as prepositions. Adverbs, he explains, can precede verbs, but you can't revise "My horse fell down" to "My horse down fell." 

The section on mythical grammar errors, dear to my heart, includes the split infinitive, the hopefully superstition, stranded prepositions (what they were looking at), singular they, and more. Read the section on passive clauses and you will be immune to the error that any construction including a form of to be or an auxiliary verb (yes, some people think that) is a passive construction. 

His thoroughgoing treatment of nouns and noun phrases, of the various classes of verbs, and of clauses, is more intricately detailed than I can expect to treat effectively in the space of a blog post; there is a lot of meat there. There are useful sections on spelling and punctuation, and he offers succinct advice on prose style that you will find much more helpful than Strunk and White.

It is sixty years since Mrs. Perkins and Mrs. Craig instructed me, and now I clearly have more to learn. Maybe you too?

Ink-stained wretch has just about had enough

 

On this date in 1986 I took my seat on the copy desk of The Baltimore Sun.

I had been a copy editor at The Cincinnati Enquirer for six and a half years and had tried out at The New York Times, which told me to get a job at a paper that took editing seriously and call again in two years. I had done the first part, and the second proved unnecessary. 

In thirty-four years at The Sun, nearly half my life, I saw serious journalism and became head of the copy desk as it developed a national reputation for effective editing, so much so that The Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal and others poached one editor after another. 

A reverse arc was also occurring, as feckless corporate gits at the Tribune Company steadily reduced the staff through buyouts and dropped content while charging readers more, because the newspaper industry failed to adapt to changing conditions. The company we worked for was for a time even called tronc, which sounds like an unimpressive video game. 

Finally, in 2021, when vulture capitalist Alden Global Capital acquired a diminished Tribune, I took a buyout and retired. And now since the purchase of the newspaper earlier this year by David Smith of Sinclair Broadcasting and Armstrong Williams, I read the paper with the same fascination that leads drivers to slow down and gawk at smashups on the highway. 

Ignoring Williams’s otiose maundering on the op-ed page is easy. I was used to disregarding The Enquirer’s editorial page, which was also dominated by right-wing cranks. Once in the mid-1980s, The Enquirer editorialized about the spread of AIDS, saying that the disease was painful and incurable, combined with a social stigma. Nevertheless, the editorial concluded, “if apprehension of contracting AIDS should lead people to forgo promiscuous sexual intercourse, then the disease will have served a useful social purpose.” 

Appalling as they are, not even Smith and Williams have yet endorsed a disease. 

Now each morning, fortified by two cups of strong coffee, I am greeted with shoddy coverage from FOX45 and Sinclair. As one of a rapidly dwindling handful of seven-day-a-week print subscribers, I wonder why I subject myself to this (though masochism cannot be ruled out). 

There are still people at The Sun attempting to do responsible journalism under adverse circumstances, and I salute them, and pray for their deliverance. For that reason, the day to call and cancel is not here, though it may not be far off. 

ADDENDUM: Fellow copy editor David Benson has corrected my misremembering about that Cincinnati Enquirer editorial. It ran on Monday, June 21, 1982, and concerned herpes, not HIV. The final sentence: "But to the extent the threat promotes abstinence in any age group may it serve a useful purpose, sparing individuals and society enormous costs."

Note that in recasting it from memory, I sharpened the editorial board's writing.