“When Editing Has All But Disappeared”

I got an email this week from an author whose work I admire and respect, Robin D.G. Kelley. A historian and academic, Kelley is the author of numerous books, including a brilliant biography of the great jazz pianist Thelonious Monk. Kelley’s email solicited donations for the Boston Review, a quarterly publication dedicated to politics and culture. In his pitch, Kelley called the Boston Review his “favorite publication,” a forum for “fresh and generative ideas” that “is not corporate, it is not trying to be hip, and it is not afraid of hard and hidden truths. No wonder so many eminent public intellectuals are flocking to its pages.” But this sentence really jumped out at me in Kelley’s communique: “Writing for Boston Review is a joy because I know that I will always be edited with rigor and care—a miracle in an age when editing has all but disappeared.”

“An age when editing has all but disappeared.” That’s an observation that certainly rings true to me. As a copy editor, I’ve received manuscripts from production editors that escaped an editor’s attention. I’d be instructed to do a “medium” edit when it needed much more than that, often re-writing, restructuring, and cutting repetitious passages. One such manuscript, a nonfiction title about a very timely subject, electronic surveillance, needed major surgery, not the “medium” copy edit I was asked to do, and I mentioned this to the production editor who assigned it. But I followed instructions and submitted a copy edit rather than the heavy edit it needed. And sure enough, when the book was reviewed by the New York Times, the reviewer called it “under-edited.” I wanted to say “I told you so” to the production editor who assigned it to me but instead, I hoped the Times review would make my point for me.

My experience with that book and a few others taught me what many in our profession have been saying for years: publishers do not want to pay for editing, especially not for copy editing that goes beyond fixing punctuation, misspellings and typos, grammar and usage, and tangled syntax. Good, conscientious copy editors can do so much more –if they’re allowed to. They can examine the focus or point of a piece of writing, ensure the logical flow of the writer’s argument or presentation, find main points that have been misplaced and make them more prominent. Good copy editing does more with language than fix errors; it includes eliminating poor word choices, replacing jargon (especially an issue with academic writing) with straightforward wording, trimming repetitious passages and cutting irrelevancies. If allowed to, a skilled copy editor also can identify and raise questions about such potential issues as fabricated claims, plagiarism, and potential libel.

What I’ve discovered as a copy editor, often to my surprise, is that many writers, including distinguished academics and authors of trade books, can’t write very well. I’m talking about writers whose work needs not only a basic clean-up but much more–pruning, clarification, restructuring, and even re-thinking.

Does that sound like overzealous overreaching? Some editors are heavy-handed, inflexible, and make poor judgments. In my experience, sometimes authors rightly complain about how their work has been handled by a copy editor. But it’s also true that far too much writing is published nowadays that would’ve benefited from the kind of editing I’m advocating and try always to practice.

“To be edited with rigor and care,” for which Robin D.G. Kelley praises the Boston Review, shouldn’t be a “miracle.”  It should be standard practice in publishing.

And that goes not only for academic and trade books or political/literary journals like the Boston Review. The New York Times, whose Book Review found the title I copy-edited “under-edited,” recently published an article about Elon Musk’s shambolic takeover of Twitter. The article noted the social medium’s fiscal problems, the fact that “it spent lavishly over the years, accumulating users, buying companies such as Instagram and WhatsApp, and showering its employees with envious perks.”

Dear New York Times: perks cannot be envious, that is, feel or show envy. They can, however, be enviable. A copy editor would have known the difference and caught this obvious error.