Off-target

 Once the Target store opened on Putty Hill Avenue in Towson in 1998, I shopped there pretty much once a week. It was part of my shopping routine, and I liked the place despite its slipshod management. (How can employees fail to notice that no shopping carts are available in the store? How can managers not think to send someone out to the corrals in the parking lot to bring the carts in?) I liked the variety of customers: a number of elderly white parties like me, lots of young people, especially students, Black customers, gay customers, a mix. 

Then, a year ago this month, the corporation abruptly dropped its DEI initiatives. Not being a party to corporate deliberations, I can't think why a company that depended on a multicultural customer base would cease efforts at diversity, equity, and inclusion, unless they imagined, with the incoming second Trump administration, they had a shot at luring Trump supporters from Walmart. 

They miscalculated. There was an immediate call for a boycott, which I joined and have maintained. (I wrote to corporate headquarters and was, of course, ignored.) They lost substantial business, sacked employees, and eventually said goodbye to the CEO responsible for the fiasco. And that is exactly what should happen to a company that betrays its most loyal customers. I gather that Target is now trying to reestablish itself with a focus on affordability--"prioritize value perception" in the jargon. But I'm skeptical.

I recall Baltimore Sun publisher Mike Waller explaining to a group of managers the consequences of a failed circulation campaign: "You lose money, it's just money. You make more money. But you lose TEN THOUSAND SUBSCRIBERS, you're never getting those people back." And we never did. 

Mind you, maintaining my principles has been inconvenient. To get the things I need, I've had to add additional stores, some of them farther away, to the weekly routine. And I'm skeptical about the utility of boycotts as well. Chick-fil-A appears to be doing bang-up business despite never having received a dime or a dollar from me. There's also the history of failed crackpot right-wing consumer boycotts over the past forty years: Remember the uproar over Procter & Gamble's supposedly Satanic logo?

Somehow, though, "forget how nasty we were to Blacks and gays and Latinos and women, because we're really, really cheap now" isn't the seductive appeal Target seems to think it is. 

What an editor needs from a writer

 As an undergraduate I aimed to become a writer of fiction. Experience proved that I lack imagination. But for nonfiction prose--articles, letters, memos--I can tell you things you need to know. 

Don't be afraid of revising. You may need time to puzzle out what you mean to say, and then how to say it effectively. You may need to take an entirely different approach than your first one. You may decide that material you included is not helpful and needs to be cut. You may need to suss out additional material. Keep at it. 

Decide what you mean to say. You should identify the One Main Thing in your article/letter/memo. It needs to have a single principal idea or element, through there may be any number of subsidiary ideas or elements. 

Say that One Main Thing in a single sentence. When you can do that, you know what your focus is. Use that sentence.

Say it up front. You may want some introductory sentences, but in the name of God keep them short. Your reader wants to know very early on what this is all about--and deserves to know that. Treat your text as if it were classical epic beginning in medias res, right where things are important now. 

Keep the background where it belongs. As a teenager working for my local paper in Kentucky I once attended a county government meeting. As the members of the fiscal court listened, the county judge spat tobacco juice into a coffee can, and I took notes, an elderly Baptist divine launched an extended narrative that involved multiple people over a considerable span of time. Some minutes into it, I gathered that he was appearing to request a fresh load of gravel on a stretch of road. 

Bring the background up after your main idea is well established, and only then if it is really germane. 

Don't screw up the chronology. Your reader needs to be oriented in place and time at every point in your text, particularly if you get fancy with the narrative and switch from the present to the past and back. 

Organize your subtopics. Each of those subsidiary ideas or elements should be addressed in a paragraph or set of paragraphs, in what appears to the reader to be a logical order, with transitions from one to the next. This is also part of the reader's orientation. 

Choose the diction that is appropriate to your subject and your reader(s). There's a lot of room in English, from the most formal to the most colloquial, and you can plot where on that broad continuum you can most effectively say what you want the reader to understand. (Read it out loud to yourself; that should help you identify language that doesn't work.)

Give it a final read for the little stuff. You know, the spelling (particularly of names), the punctuation, the grammar, the usage. That stuff. 

The consequence: Neglect any of these things, and it will fall to me to fix them, and I'm good at what I do. I charge for it. But you would probably prefer to say what you mean yourself, clearly and effectively, rather than have me attempt to guess what you mean. 

I do say

 Coming up in the new year: In February, when I turn seventy-five, I will mark forty-six years since The Cincinnati Enquirer offered me a position on the copy desk and allowed me to discover what my vocation is. 

Most of what I have learned about editing in more than forty years can be found at the You Don't Say blog at The Baltimore Sun, which is either accessible only by subscription or no longer available.* Some of the videos recorded at The Sun, such as the first-day-of-class warning and the recipe for mint juleps, can be found on Facebook or YouTube. 

And here. I started this version in 2009 when The Sun laid me off, along with sixty other news employees (hiring me back a year later). This version of the blog mixes personal subjects with professional ones, but there is still quite a bit of material about editing, such as the importance of skepticism, a code for copy editors, and what is in effect a minicourse in editing. Feel free to explore the site. 

And as I mention "free," let me point out that if you discover anything of value here, I make it available to you at no cost. 

*I am not [cough] on good terms with the current ownership and management.