An editor’s lament

Editing good writers is a pleasure. Editing bad writers is a migraine.

The news copy of good writers is simple, concise and clear, infused with the natural rhythms of language. Occasional blemishes in the copy stand out, easily fixed.

The news copy of bad writers is a morass of fuzzy thinking, inattention to detail, atrocious spelling and a tin ear.

I left the editing racket years ago because I ran out of steam from fixing too much bad copy. I worked with a lot of good writers but the bad ones have displaced them in my memory, to wit:

Reporters sometimes filed their copy past deadline, then declared they were leaving the office for some personal matter. “I didn’t have time to cut it to 700 words,” they’d say over their shoulder, to which I replied: “OK, I’ll just cut from the bottom up.” This usually provoked an objection. “But there’s important stuff at the bottom.” Me: “Then why is it at the bottom?” An exasperated look would follow, then an exit. I would chop the bottom without even reading it.

Then there was the double-edit. A reporter sends a story for editing, and as I near the end of the task, the person tells me they went back to rewrite parts they’d been unhappy about. Now two versions of the story need to be merged, and given a second edit.

Or there’s the fill-the-hole bugbear. A reporter files copy, but there’s a missing piece – a date, a name, some essential background. The reporter apparently had no time to insert it. “I’ve got to run – can you look it up?” comes the shout from the hallway. Now I’ve become a research assistant, plugging a hole, then editing my own handiwork.

An extreme example of fill-the-hole came from my own boss. He fancied himself a reporter, and would record an interview with his subject, whether a business person, government official or activist. Then he would flip the cassette tape onto the editing desk on his way out the door, ordering that it be transcribed and turned into a quick story.

Sometimes a reporter was required to rewrite copy submitted by a local newspaper, trimming it and making it comprehensible to a national audience. One day, a newspaper sent us a story about a diving school that offered scuba courses. One of our rewriters inexplicably changed “diving” to “driving,” assuming for some reason that the “r” had accidentally been dropped from the newspaper copy. When I edited the rewrite, I noticed that students in the story were testing their driving skills in 30 feet of water while wearing a wetsuit. The reporter had systematically altered the word without ever clueing into the absurdity.

The worst example of sloppiness came from a reporter whose story set off alarms before I had even read the first paragraph. This person had misspelled his own name in the byline. I fixed it, and told him so. He just shrugged.

“There is bad in all good authors: what a pity the converse isn't true!” said poet Philip Larkin (1922-85). It took me most of a career to figure that out.

Jan 27, 2022