I Was an Editorial Virgin

My first “real” editing experience was as an assistant news editor for our college paper. This meant that, for a whopping $30 a week, I spent my Friday afternoons in the Retriever Weekly offices editing other reporters’ stories while frantically trying to write and edit my own. The editorial instruction amounted to “Here, edit this.” Did I know what I was doing? Heck no! Did I let that stop me? Heck no! I blundered confidently forward, totally oblivious to my own ignorance.

One of the first things you learn as an editor is that you don’t know everything, and you never will. Once you have accepted that basic truth, you become aware of the things you don’t know; you develop an instinct for when you need to double-check the rules for capitalization or comma use, for example. You admit that there are certain words you always confuse or misspell, and you learn to look them up every time you use them. You also learn there is no shame in not knowing everything, and stopping to look something up is an editorial virtue.

These days, I look things up all the time. I’ve learned the hard way that I can’t trust myself. During my brief career as assistant news editor, I rarely looked things up. I thought I knew it all already. It saddens me now to think of how many errors I must have let slip by. But that was before I understood what editing really is. I just didn’t know what I didn’t know.

The second thing you need to learn is how to edit while allowing writers to have their own voice. This is not easy. What do you do if the writer’s “voice” is just bad English? Do you correct everything and take that voice away? Let everything go? Fix some things and leave others? It’s easy to let arrogance slip in. Often, we would get news stories that were little more than lists of notes, or that were so disorganized it was hard to know what to do with them. I would find myself thinking, This story would be so much better if I had just written it myself. (Yes, I was an arrogant twit.) I practically rewrote many stories. Now I wonder if that was always necessary, or if my overconfidence allowed me to take other writers’ voices away from them. Probably I stole some voices, and I regret that now.

You’ll be happy to know that I am more humble now. Experience will do that. I’m confident in my skills, and I know my weaknesses. I understand my role as an editor: to polish up someone else’s writing and let their voice come through loud and clear. My ego has nothing to do with it. I’m not here to impose my will on other writers’ work. In fact, if I’ve done my job well, you’ll never know I was here at all.