Published October 13, 2024
Copy editors in my world do many things. They need many skills. It’s not just about following proper house style or AP style or even grammar “rules.” It has to be so.
If it’s not, you’re vulnerable. So is your company, whether it seems to know that or not. Whether you know it or not.
You might be vulnerable anyway, but for sure, in many nonfiction arenas, the more you make the job of editing copy mainly about style, or even grammar, the easier you are making it for someone to lay you off someday.
“What is style, exactly?” I imagine a bean counter asking. If the answer sounds as if the job is all about whether a term should be one word or two, maybe hyphenated, that won’t be enough to save your job. Consistency? Nope. Not worth your salary at that point.
You should hope the person advocating for you can explain how much more there is to being a copy editor. And hope that’s enough.
Editors read for clarity. They read for flow. They read to see if there are places where the reader will have to stop and read a line again to understand it. And again.
The best editors check facts. They make sure the timeline is in order. Check for misspelled names. Exercise news judgment. Edit with conscious language in mind. Spy for biases of all kinds. Loaded words. Cliches. Zombie rules. Something Mrs. Dampersand taught in her third-grade English class that was worth forgetting after it escaped her lips.
And as I wrote last week, some of the most boring writing I’ve ever seen follows all the rules. Being a good boy or girl and merely going by the book won’t save you.
One of the most important things an editor can do is keep you from being sued. Or publicly humiliated. Pubicly, even, to use a typo whose correct and incorrect forms should be absent from your dictionary of correctly spelled words (so you’re forced to notice them).
Don’t let style and grammar be all it’s about
But wait! There’s more! You have to ask questions. Is what we’re saying fair? Accurate? Well-sourced? If we are not naming the sources, do they have an agenda we are going to be complicit in, to our regret and shame?
Are we going to sound like homers, cheerleaders for the home team and coach? Might we just as well hand coaches our laptop and let them write the story, for all the requisite editorial distance we are forfeiting by how we write about them?
Are we pretending to be experts in something we are not? Are we mindlessly repeating a cliche?
Is the writer doing Voice of God reporting? How do we know this thing we are saying? Why are we stating it as fact if we got it from a coach or parent or boyfriend? Don’t be afraid to attribute. No one thinks you know everything. Stop thinking you have to come across that way.
You report. You don’t read minds. Know when that matters.
This is just the tip of the iceberg lettuce an editor has to peel away. All of it affects credibility in the eyes of the reader. Whether it’s ground ball, groundball, ground-ball out or groundball out probably does not.
We did all of this and more at CBSSports.com and were still all laid off in 2013, a mere 11 months after our editing team was created. I think about that every day.
Seriously, don’t let it be
I know that in my world, it’s adviser, not advisor. Proven is to be used only as an adjective. It’s 9 feet, not nine feet, and 7 percent, not seven percent. Will this knowledge save me? Of course not.
I can’t say it enough times: For most of us, the more we let the job of editing copy be about style, and maybe even grammar, the easier we are making it for someone to lay us off someday.
The algorithms and databases that companies are preparing as our replacements can’t do what we do, what a human being can do. And we need to always show that. I’ve worked a lot of places for a lot of people, and by now, the rules all sound right and all sound wrong. So who’s right? The person who is your supervisor that night. The next night? Different story, probably.
The rules usually become their own moral good, as if it’s all about them.
Oh gosh, you broke a rule.
Good for you. That’s probably what made it interesting to read.
Have you read the comments on websites? Yes? Tell me how much “style” appears to matter to most readers. The truth is, it matters far more to other editors than it does to them. Other editors aren’t keeping you employed.
Hi, I’m Carly, a human
There are worlds where style and grammar are everything. This is not about those places. This is about where there’s so much more editors must know how to do.
Being human is the most important part.
I say this as news organizations continue to bleed readership. The lack of a sustainable business model is one reason for that. But much of it comes from stubborn reluctance to liberate ourselves from outdated thinking about writing and editing. Please don’t make me edit like it’s 1983. It’s 2024. Soon, 2025.
My sixth-grade grammar textbook was the advanced grammar text at the local college. I made straight A’s. I correctly diagrammed a sentence that was seven lines long. But I’m not in sixth grade anymore. You could probably construct an editing test guaranteed to make me fail it, with tenses that to today’s reader would likely sound like having had haddened the haddengist of hads and hadliness.
I’d feel like I’d been had.
There’s so much to unlearn
My first five years in newspapers forced me to unlearn much of what I’d learned in school. A decade of studying how language evolves forced me to unlearn much of what I learned in my first 20 years in newspapers. The skills I bring to the job today are all but unmatched where I look. “But you let that writer split an infinitive!” you might say. Well, you might want to read what linguists, grammarians and lexicographers say about that. I work in English, not Latin.
Every rule has exceptions. Not every editor working in a newsroom understands that. Too many don’t know what they don’t know. Much of what they know stopped serving their readers long ago, if it ever did.
People used to be quoted as saying, “I’ve got to do better.” Now it’s “I got to do better.” My grammar teachers and mentors are turning in their graves! “Go Tigers” without the comma? Noooo!
But times change.
Heads exploded in a 2016 seminar I attended called “Sweat This, Not That,” given by Lisa McLendon of the University of Kansas. I’ve said that some word people would be more inclined to forgive you if you kidnapped their pet than if you debunked their pet peeves. I’m not sure I’m joking.
As cool as it might be in some ways, I don’t want to wake up one day and discover that I’m a dinosaur. That’s why I’ve studied editing and writing as much as possible since 2013. But my continuing education feels like a blessing and a curse. I work in one of the few industries where staying stuck in the past is rewarded and evolving is suspect.
I’d rather be working than “right.” An important step in that is letting go of the concept of “right” and “wrong.” Do what’s best for the reader. Stop spending so much time and energy on things readers don’t notice and more time on things they do. We have only so much energy. We’re human. That’s the best thing we can be in this lifetime.
Footnote
I almost made the teacher Mrs. Hampersand. Which name do you prefer?
See? So many ways to write. Hampersand & Dampersand could be characters in a comic book. Get on that, someone!
Thanks for stopping by! Go relax! Here, have an apple!
Photo of person typing on a laptop by David MG via Shutterstock.
Image of fact-checking key by David Carillet via Shutterstock.