Clients may wonder why it’s necessary for an editor to work on the text used in a print publication or website (or even something as “simple” as a poster). After all, you ran the spelling check…
Here are some of the reasons:
• Structure and style: What’s the best way to organise and present your information? Does the order make sense? How formal do you want to be? What method have you chosen to tell your story?
• Who cares? Who are you “talking” to and what do you want them to do as a result? Does your text reach those people effectively and give them what they need?
• Consistency: Often, especially when several people have provided text, inconsistency arises in things like the style for headings, the use of capital letters and punctuation, the way information is arranged, and many other choices.
• Accuracy: It’s always worth checking the facts. Doing this can also highlight contradictions between statements.
• Clarity: You may take it for granted that people will understand what you mean, but an outsider with no experience of your line of business may be able to ask questions that unpack your ideas and help you to express yourself more directly. Funnily enough, the “About” section of a website is often the very place where companies and organisations get so overwrought about their image that it’s impossible to figure out what they actually do. Precise, explicit expression is also more likely to bring internet users to your site when they search for keywords. If you search for “bakery”, for example, you won’t find a site that describes a company as an “oven-processed goods solutions provider”
• Conciseness: This is related to the previous point. You’re excited about your product, service, mission or achievements, and you want to make sure that people know everything there is to know about it. But often it’s too much information, conveyed with too many words. An editor can get your message across effectively in fewer words, or in a more structured way, so that readers don’t lose interest.
• Adding more information: On the other hand, you may need to add information to make your meaning clearer, to be consistent or to indicate your source. An editor can do this in a concise way which increases the value of the text.
• Checking details: Spelling, missing words, repetition, typos, punctuation, misunderstood words, use of abbreviations, etc.
• Grammar: It’s there to make your meaning clear. Use it well and you will stand out from the crowd.
• Polish: The final result should be a smooth and easy read which achieves its purpose.
It’s hard to give away control of your words, but a good editor should be sensitive to your style and tone, and understand what you are trying to achieve. A discussion about this at the outset of a big project can avert a lot of pain. An editor should never make assumptions: his or her job is to ask questions, check things and check again. This takes time.
Because time is money, it’s useful to know the difference between three processes which all take their own time: rewriting, sub-editing, and proofreading.
Rewriting speaks for itself. Sub-editing is a thorough checking and polishing process (described in the points above) which can involve some rewriting, and is best done in a format like Word, before it goes to the design/layout/uploading phase. Proofreading is not only a final check of the text itself (for typos, etc) but also a check that it has been put in the right place, that there is no repetition, that things like page numbering and footnotes are correct, that the right captions go with the pictures, that all the text and illustrations are present, that spacing is correct, that words or numbers match a previous version if necessary, that requested changes have been made, and so on.
You may have heard these words of HG Wells: “No passion in the world is equal to the passion to alter someone else’s draft.”
The writer Willa Cather was kinder to editors: “Art, it seems to me, should simplify ... finding what conventions of form and what detail one can do without and yet preserve the spirit of the whole – so that all that one has suppressed and cut away is there to the reader’s consciousness as much as if it were in type on the page.”