It happened in February

Groundhog Day, Candlemas, Valentine's Day, Super Bowl, and Presidents Day are not the February days I find most important. 

It was on the 7th of February in 1980 that I interviewed with Jim Schottelkotte, the managing editor of The Cincinnati Enquirer, and Denny Dressman, the assistant managing editor, and was offered a three-week paid tryout on the copy desk, beginning on the 8th. 

The tryout went well, because I knew grammar and usage, because I had a basic knowledge of journalism from working for Lowell and Jean Denton at the Flemingsburg Gazette for six summers in high school and college, and because I found I loved the company of smart, funny, ironic copy editors.

The following month I accepted a full-time position at The Enquirer, beginning my four decades as a professional editor and discovering what I was meant to do. 

It was on another day in February, the 15th in 2022, that I had an online interview with Kimi Yoshino, the editor-in-chief of the just-aborning Baltimore Banner. I was eight months retired after thirty-four years as an editor at The Baltimore Sun, but still subject to the itch to edit and intrigued by the possibility of what The Banner might bring to Baltimore. 

Four years later, The Banner is thriving, and I am carrying on. 

And February this year provides a little more of note. In eight days I will turn seventy-five, and in twenty-one days a surgeon is scheduled to remove my cancerous prostate. 

Short month, big days.

You have your crotchets, and I have mine

 We all have opinions, and many of them are about words or constructions that we dislike intensely.* But I, as a professional editor, must keep my idiosyncratic preferences under restraint. Thus it becomes necessary to rationalize my crotchets to give them some color of authority. 

Take, for example, ongoing. To you it's likely innocuous; to me it is irritating because the context is almost always clear and the word is redundant. "Tempers flare in the ongoing political debate." "Businesses lose customers because of the ongoing construction." You know that debate and construction are in progress. The writer inserts the unnecessary ongoing to tell the reader, "This is really, really current." For the same reason, currently can frequently be deleted without harm.

Or tout. To my ear, the word carries unsavory echoes of racetrack slang, someone brazenly promoting. It can suggest boasting or bragging. I see it regularly when public officials and business interests ballyhoo some project that is going to cost taxpayers a bundle. The same overtone, that someone may be attempting to put something over on you, adheres to the synonyms boost and plug. I usually substitute praise or promote. Tout gained a lingering vogue among journalists because it is short and handy in a headline. 

And while we are considering relics of 1940s tabloid journalism, let's not forget blast, which does not usually involve dynamite, nitroglycerin, or Semtex, but merely means "criticize." OK, sometimes "denounce." The verb nix still occasionally crops up, though Walter Winchell has lain beneath the sod these five decades and more. (Once--I tell you this from direct experience--I encountered a story submitted for publication that said someone had been "fingered in the heist.") But to be fair, it has been a while since I have seen lambaste.) 

I despair that writers will ever repent of the pleonasms mass exodus and safe haven. 

Uh, you do understand how they are redundant, right?

Author as a noun suggests a degree of prestige, as in Wolcott Gibbs's advice to editors, "Always respect an author's style, if he is an author and has a style." As a verb, to say that someone authored a memo or report or some other routine piece of prose carries a smell of pretension, especially since wrote is a nice, compact, straightforward little word. 

Then there are the usually empty words that writers use to puff up their subjects: influential, powerful, incredible (often for overpriced or vulgarly expensive housing), prestigious. Trust me, the Nobel and the Pulitzer do not need you to signal that people think they are important. And using it for the Top Advertising Salesman in the Tri-State Area This Year will not much elevate the award in the reader's mind. 

You may wish to chime in with this roster, explaining your reasons. Feel free. But be advised that if you litter the comments section with unsupported dicta, I will delete freely. 

*I wrote a little book, Bad Advice: The Most Unreliable Counsel Available on Grammar, Usage, and Writing, in which I point out that some views you may hold are bogus: Yes, you can use that to refer to human beings, irregardless is indeed a word, singular they is swell ... It's a cheap paperback. Get informed. 

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.