Bill's Notes

I once called Salon's Gary Kamiya the worst professional writer in the world, bar none. Now I take it back. Here's a fine piece on my current profession, editing. [Not sure the link will work. If not, sign in for a one-day guest pass.]

Good editors work with and not against a writer. They calibrate how aggressively they edit according to how good the writer is, how good the piece is, the type of piece it is, the kind of relationship they have with the writer, how tight the deadline is, and what mood they're in. But an editor's primary responsibility is not to the writer but to the reader. He or she must be ruthlessly dedicated to making the piece stronger. Since this is ultimately a subjective judgment, and quite a tricky one, a good editor needs to be as self-confident as a writer.

As readers here have pointed out, my posts usually get shortened by about a third in subsequent re-writes. That's because I can usually be an editor to my own writing, and taking out excess words and side issues makes the essential point stronger. [Pats self on back.] That said, you can't be afraid to "edit in," too.

However, I often simply have no time to do a real editing job here at Bill's Notes. So a lot of stuff is in pretty raw form. And as Hemingway once purportedly said, the first draft of everything is shit.

When it comes to editing, there are really three different tasks, and they use different parts of your brain.:

1. Proofreading. Yes, this is a form of editing, and an important one. Good proofreading, however, is like rebounding in basketball: largely a question of effort. Yes, skill and natural talent are important, but largely, it's a matter of forcing yourself to concentrate and find errors.

2. Line editing. I also call this copy editing. It's about improving sentences and story organization. You go over the copy and put words together that belong together, remove passivity, unsmother verbs, front-load sentences that are incorrectly backloaded, spot missed opportunities. Sometimes, it's about wholesale reorganization. Sometimes involves some light questioning of the writer to remove ambiguities and some holes in the story [the latter involves details, not conceptual problems. See next section.]. It's not rewriting, however. "Rewrite" is a separate skill.

3. Conceptual editing. This is the big picture stuff, when you sit back in your chair and think the big thoughts. This involves taking on the story as a concept -- examining and assessing the idea, spotting holes and help focus the story as much as possible. You determine the validity of the supporting evidence, challenge the thinking and conclusions, and do all you can to shore up the concept and make it as strong as possible for the readers.

There are also other necessary skills, especially headline writing and rewriting. For some reason, these also got dumped on the editor's plate.

In my 20 some years in editorial, I've heard the same feedback regarding my editorial skills from almost all my bosses: Many people are better than me at one of two of these areas, but few are as consistently good at all of them. I'm sort of an editing pentathlete [pats self on back again]. You'll find better proofers, better line editors, better headline writers, better rewriters and better conceptual editors. But usually they won't be the same people.

But all this said, I'm really a writer, not an editor, anyway. Which is a whole different set of skills.