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Copy Editing: Bringing Clarity to a Fast-Paced World

  

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Ever notice how a confluence of events and thoughts, though unrelated, can lead to a whole new way of understanding? When this happens, I may initially be unsettled by this new challenge to business as usual, but these occurrences almost always wind up expanding my ability to cope in this increasingly demanding, fast-paced world. Such a convergence recently beset me and has called into question where I stand—or, perhaps, should stand—concerning quality in copy editing.

Editorially speaking, I admit to falling into the category of "old school." On the whole, I have no patience with inept written expression, and not too long ago I felt comfortably ensconced among the "majority" of editors and wordsmiths. But not any longer because I repeatedly find myself facing a surprising dilemma:

In contemporary communication, how much attention do the bones of good writing—spelling, grammar, syntax, punctuation, and the like—still warrant?

In truth, this question isn't entirely new to me. A book published in the early 1980s stands out in memory as being my initiation into a not-so-brave, but definitely new, world in which I no longer felt safe relying on the veracity of words printed on a page.

This was the first volume of three devoted to the life of Bernard Berenson, and several colleagues considered it a "literary event." The author, an internationally esteemed scholar, and the publisher, one of the most highly regarded university presses in the world, were both irreproachable.

A friend, who was something of a Berenson expert, urged his just-published copy on me. Having read and reread it, he had speckled the pages with notes about factual inaccuracies. Eager to discuss it, he checked up on my progress a couple of times a week. I finally, shamefacedly told him I could not get through the book. It was taking forever, I admitted, because I continually stopped cold at recurring editorial problems—mistakes, really.

(At the time, most authors had yet to be introduced to word processors, and it would be a couple of decades before writers simply turned in their electronic files knowing with near certainty that it was shortly to be dumped peremptorily into the typesetting hopper, unedited.)

Consider this corollary to the dilemma:

As the pace of you name it—business, commuting, reading, life in general—progressively hastens, isn't it increasingly important for written communication to keep pace? And won't that be simpler if we rely on agreed-upon "rules" and standards? Isn't the shortest distance between two points still a straight line?

I am enrolled in an online marketing webinar for which students were recently given a two-page document outlining ten guidelines. Its writers obviously strive to be succinct, clear, and to the point, and graphically speaking they've succeeded, but I question whether anybody bothered to read (much less copy edit) the piece before clicking "post."

For example, the writer states that a particular page "has to explain the value someone will receive by them giving you their information in exchange for your content." Do the obvious haste—and apparent need for it—excuse the bungled, potentially misleading writing? How difficult would it have been to recast that sentence into something like... "[The page] has to explain how the content offered provides sufficient value for the requested information." There must be at least a dozen ways to revise this, of course, but my question remains: Does anybody (else) care?

Years of editing have rendered me incapable of ignoring incompetent construction and the other symptoms of poor writing. They are like speed bumps on the highway of personal reading. But it is in my work that I continually wrestle with where to draw the standards line. Does my client want well-written, clearly expressed prose, or "just the facts"?

Recently, I was startled to discover that my average per-page editing speed has diminished notably, and I attribute that to the fact that I no longer work by reflex. I know "the rules" and seldom need to confer with the experts (e.g., Chicago Manual of Style), but now I continually question editorial calls that warranted no consideration when it was simply assumed that "fixing" such problems was necessary and part of the job.

While I have no illusions about my work and recognize that I'm pretty much stuck with my own methods and personal requirements, I keep finding myself stumped when vetting the work of another editor who would like to do freelance work for me. Now I question how much of what I consider "sloppy" is really standard operating procedure. Should I continue to dismiss that kind of work automatically, or learn to live with it?

Will anybody (else) care?

Photo credit: Northern New England Chapter of the American Planning Association (NNECAPA)