As I’ve mentioned once or twice before in this column, I occasionally teach a special-topics course at the university, mainly for English majors, that I designed myself Creative Writing 198 (Professional Writing). I was worried that our students were graduating with wispy notions of poetry and fiction in their heads, but without the foggiest idea of the kind of writing that the world out there will actually pay for, enough for them to make a living.
Shakespeare is great for the soul, and I can’t recommend him and his noble ilk enough to people wanting transport to the rarefied summits of language, but unless or maybe even if you’re an absolute expert on the man and his work all that exquisite knowledge won’t feed you in this country. Neither will writing novels, epics, or three-act plays.
So I put together a package of practical tasks and skills that I thought would help the typical English major make a profession of writing. As I tell everyone on Day One of CW 198, there’s writing you do for yourself, and writing you do for others and this is all about the “others”: the media organizations, the private companies, the government agencies, and the NGOs, among other institutions, that will need their writing talents. Our syllabus includes introductions to and exercises in business correspondence, the press release, interviewing, feature writing, speechwriting, publishing, new media, and audiovisual scriptwriting.
But one other item on the syllabus is often underemphasized, even in writing classes: editing. We didn’t have enough time this semester to practice enough of it, but I was able to give them an overview of what to expect not just in the newsroom, where much copyediting has traditionally taken place, but also within private organizations like banks, law and accounting firms, and international agencies, all of which need and employ editors for their public relations or corporate communications departments.
What’s editing all about? The way I see and teach it, editing involves understanding, correcting, and finetuning the draft text of a manuscript to present it to its intended readers in the best and clearest possible form. Much of the work has to do with grammatical, mechanical (i.e., punctuation and spelling), and stylistic corrections to the text. This is where you make sure that tricky words like “Massachusetts” are spelled rightly, and that superfluous expressions like “at this point in time” are reduced to “at present” or even “now” (and, also, that “presently” is used not to mean “now,” but, in more conservative if paradoxical usage, “soon”).
But a good editor will also go beyond spotting and fixing technical problems in the text. He or she should be able to appreciate, respect, and harmonize the author’s intentions and the publisher’s or reader’s requirements. Above all, he or she should give the text the attention it deserves to polish the draft to its finest form, clearing it of all roughnesses and infelicities, so that reading the text becomes a pleasure rather than a chore or a conundrum.
I also tell my students that there are many kinds of editors, and many kinds or degrees of editing. The editors we probably know best although most people rarely if ever meet one are those who sit at the desks of newspapers and magazines, checking the reporter’s or writer’s copy for errors and infirmities in style and substance.
Before the days of e-mail, when you had to be in the office every day and physically hand over your typescript to a deskman, you saw and felt how powerful these godlike gatekeepers were. As an 18-year-old reporter on the Philippines Herald with raw writing talent but little journalistic sense I once had a story sent back to me for rewriting half a dozen times by a deskman; I was in tears, but it was an effective crash course in writing tightly and objectively. “Omit flowers!” I was told about my tremulous tale, which was about an activist’s funeral, a topic of deep personal interest and therefore a dangerous one. Deskmen are often gnomish and obscure, but now and then a star is born around that table; one of our pit bosses at the Herald was a fellow who also wrote songs on the side, named George Canseco.
Other editors work not on the news, but on documents produced and published for more specialized readers technical reports, book manuscripts, correspondence, and even material for the Web. These editors often work within and for organizations, the larger ones of which will have editorial or PR departments to service their internal and external information needs. Some editors, like myself when I put this hat on, work freelance, under contract; I typically edit books (e.g., the biography of Hans Menzi, the Malampaya natural gas project, a coffeetable book on Muntinlupa, and Kasaysayan, a 10-volume history of the Philippines) as well as occasional publications (Newsbreak magazine’s special reports) and technical material for agencies such as the National Economic and Development Authority and the Asian Development Bank.
Depending on the task at hand and the terms of the job, some kinds of editing can be easier than others. I’ve simplified this idea for my students into light, moderate, and heavy editing. Light editing is little more than proofreading (yet another indispensable editorial skill) checking grammar and spelling, ensuring conformity with the stylebook, giving the text a few tweaks to perk it up. Moderate editing will involve all that plus a bit of rewriting moving sentences and paragraphs around to improve overall clarity, shortening a draft considerably to meet word-count limits or to tighten up the prose, returning the draft to the writer with comments for correction or clarification.
Heavy editing, the most challenging of all, demands massive revision indeed, practically writing a whole new draft or another version of a document. I might be asked, for example, to produce an executive summary of a long report; one of my most ambitious projects along this line was the the production of a “popular version” of the national development plan, rendering complex economic concepts in a language accessible to high-school readers.
What does an editor need to know or have to be, to be a good one? To begin with, not just proficiency or competence in but mastery of the language being edited, particularly its grammar, syntax, and vocabulary. Beyond knowing the language, a good editor also needs to know the culture of both the writer and reader (not to forget that of the commissioning client), to be sensitive enough to nuances of meaning and interpretation. An exposure to and interest in other areas of knowledge economics, history, science, and information technology can also mean the difference between getting an editing job or not, or doing it well or not.
A good editor can save an important but badly written story. It’s a fair deal many editors won’t know the first thing to do if they had to step out of their cubicles and write a story, while some reporters have the sharpest instincts and the bravest hearts but a sorry command of language.
I don’t think that you have to be a great writer yourself to be a good editor, although it will surely help. Editing and writing will sometimes entail different sensibilities and frames of mind, although good experienced writers can switch from one mode to the other. Writing is more intuitive and subliminal; editing, like criticism, is much more conscious and deliberate. I’ve turned down many writing offers, but I’ve hardly ever said no to an editing job, even if the pay tends to be lower it’s more predictable, and I’ve yet to hear anyone complain of “editor’s block.”
Next week, I’ll talk about resources available to editors, and about problems they should expect to encounter on the job.
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E-mail me at penmanila@yahoo.com and visit my blog at www.penmanila.net.