On the Posture of the Editor
Eight voices on what the editor's hand holds back.
Of course, when you correct the errors of others, do so with kindness, in the hope that later writers will be as kind when they correct yours.
– Burkle-Young & Maley (Norris, epigraph)
Kindness in correction is foresight.
So much of copy editing is about not going beyond your province. Anti-ultracrepidationism. Writers might think we’re applying rules and sticking it to their prose in order to make it fit some standard, but just as often we’re backing off, making exceptions, or at least trying to find a balance between doing too much and doing too little.
– Mary Norris, Between You & Me, ch. 2
The editor stops where the writer’s authority begins – proportion, not just restraint.
A way of layering the sequence of changes, keeping a trail that showed the stage at which the change was made and whose idea it was.
– Mary Norris, on New Yorker foundry proofs
Every correction names its maker and its moment.
I was hellbent on rectifying what might be a glitch in a cliché… Two mistakes: I would have gone beyond my province, and I would have introduced an error into McPhee’s carefully wrought prose.
So I stayed my hand, the itchy-fingered hand with the pencil in it, and spent the weekend with a clean conscience.
– Mary Norris, on McPhee’s “new, and far between”
The urge to correct may be the error; stay the hand until certainty earns the intervention.
The editor who would dare tinker with this sentence has two options… It turns out there is a third option: do nothing. Sometimes it’s easier to reconcile oneself to the dangler than it is to fix it.
– Mary Norris, editing St. Aubyn
Leaving the text alone is as much an editorial act as changing it.
The fix, though, would do violence to the voice – the narrator’s diary is written in note-taking fashion, so the subject is often left out. The easiest fix… would drain the sentence of character.
– Mary Norris, editing Saunders’ “The Semplica-Girl Diaries”
The writer’s voice lives in the form; fixing the form fixes the voice out.
First we get the rocks out… Then we get the pebbles out. Then we get the sand out, and the writer’s voice rises. No harm done.
– Lu Burke (Norris, ch. 2)
Editing removes; the writer’s voice rises from the space.
You don’t get permission for this, of course; you take the liberty.
– James Salter, letter on commas (Norris, ch. 5)
Writerly authority is taken, not granted.