Copy Editing: It Works

Here at SPOGG, we love a good editor--so much so that the bad editors in our past, including the one who changed a woman's name from "Wanda" to "Panda" in a news story, are forgiven.

Lately, copy editors have on occasion been deemed not central to the core business of journalism. This is patently untrue, even if it's not particularly surprising given the myopic, conservative, often clubby way the newspaper business is run.

Hence, we particularly enjoy this bit from the blog of John McIntyre, formerly of the Baltimore Sun:

Save money: Cut back on editing

A correction from The Washington Post:

A Nov. 26 article in the District edition of Local Living incorrectly said a Public Enemy song declared 9/11 a joke. The song refers to 911, the emergency phone number.

Read the rest. It gets better from here.

Slightly Pornographic

At least it is thus for some members of SPOGG: an inside look at the life and times of a New Yorker copy editor, Ms. Mary Norris, who has been with the magazine for 31 years.

Our favorite quote:

"The thing I like most about my job is that it draws on my entire background. I know a little Italian and Greek that sometimes come in handy. I once caught a mistake in Middle English (in a piece by Andrew Porter yet)—the only time my graduate degree has ever had a practical use. I know the name of the airport in Cleveland, and that can be useful when you’re reading a piece of fiction by a Southern writer who is making things up about northern Ohio. It’s redemptive to have a practical use for the arcana of Roman Catholicism."

When Copy Editors Attack

Vanity Fair has edited Sarah Palin's resignation speech. Read if it you want to see red.

An Ode to Copy Editors

Here's the winner of our copy editing contest. This piece, written by Jeff Owens, turned our question--how does copy editing save the world--on its head.

The simple fact is that while good copy editing saves much writing from clumsiness, inelegance and error, it can’t save the world. True, many copy editors—a charmingly if not irascibly OCD bunch—behave often enough as if it can, but it can’t.

Don’t worry about the world, though. The world will take care of itself with or without us.

What copy editing can do is help save the language, and brother, never was that mission more urgent than it is right now. It’s a shameful embarrassment how many otherwise functioning (more or less) U.S. adults managed to finish high school but still can’t write a sentence—let alone a letter, an essay or even an e-mail—without sounding like one of the Clampetts. And then there’s marketing, corporate-speak and the digital age; all relentlessly tearing away at written English like piranhas (I’ll step outside with anyone who thinks impacted can be used by anyone besides dentists).

Copy editing takes the great literary wilderness of poor grammar, style, usage and spelling used by the Great Unwashed every day and attempts to impose its own sort of manifest destiny on it, and to impart sensible order and structural soundness (to say nothing of good spelling and factual correctness) on a sprawling language that is constantly evolving. It doesn't even have to make writing great—just making it not suck is often good enough.

Copy editing, then, is no less than a bastion of civilization. The world doesn’t need saving. But the word does, and copy editing is what fights the good fight.

Nutmeg, We Never Knew!

Sheryl C. sends this proof that copy-editing does matter:

Swedish food magazine Matmagasinet had to recall its last issue after a recipe poisoned at least four people. They overdosed on nutmeg (a deliriant when taken in high doses) but are now feeling better. From AFP:

"There was a mistake in a recipe for apple cake. Instead of calling for two pinches of nutmeg it said 20 nutmeg nuts were needed," Matmagasinet's chief editor Ulla Cocke told AFP..."We publish 1,200 recipes each year, and of course there have been times when they've had a bit too much butter or too little flour, but we have never experienced anything like this before," Cocke said.

Of course, common sense is also a good thing to use when cooking. Twenty nutmeg nuts? That is nuts.