About Editing and Writing

From an article on bbc.com by James Harbeck titled “Why all English speakers worry about slipping up: The English language is confusing, inconsistent and easy to muddle. But some pour too much scorn on those who break the rules”:

Since Jonathan Swift’s 1712 Proposal for Correcting, Improving and Ascertaining the English Tongue, two centuries of self-appointed correctors and improvers of English usage – such as Robert Lowth, HW Fowler, George Orwell, Kingsley Amis, Simon Heffer, Lynne Truss, and Neville Gwynne – have decried the decadent state of our language and instructed people on how to use it better….

From The Writer’s Almanac:

It’s the birthday of journalist and novelist Tom Wolfe, born in 1930 in Richmond, Virginia. He is the author of the novels The Bonfire of the Vanities, A Man in Full, I Am Charlotte Simmons, and Back to Blood. He said, “The reason a writer writes a book is to forget a book, and the reason a reader reads one is to remember it.”

The historian Meredith Hindley credits Wolfe with introducing the terms “statusphere”, “the right stuff”, “radical chic”, and “the Me Decade” into the English lexicon.

By Richard Babcock

At the newspaper where I started out, I kept getting pushed into editing. The higher-ups were acting on the dubious logic that because I had a law degree I must know useful things about editing.

Now, decades later, I realize that there was a limited truth to their reasoning. Many of the essential skills we were taught in law school are the same skills at play in good editing: spotting issues; recognizing necessary facts; seeing all 360 degrees around a dispute; presenting information and arguments in logical order; sensing what’s missing; writing with clarity.

From a lithub.com post titled “How Many of the 100 Most Famous Passages in Literature Can You Identify?” Try these 12:

1. Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.

2. Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

3. Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.

4. And so we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.

By Jack Limpert

The best editors are inner-directed by an internal gyroscope, not other-directed-—taking cues from other people. (See The Lonely Crowd, by David Riesman.). Some editors, and many writers, are other-directed and try too hard to impress other journalists.

Fast-thinking—now the driving force in digital journalism—is often wrong. In his book, Thinking, Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman shows there are two ways of thinking: Fast thinking operates automatically and quickly, with little or no effort. Slow thinking gives attention to effortful mental activities and can override the impulses of fast thinking. A good editor can make journalism better by bringing more thoughtfulness, more slow-thinking, to it.

From a New York Times story by Marc Tracy headlined “The Little Magazine That Incubated Team Biden”:

It has only 500 subscribers. And yet Democracy: A Journal of Ideas, a 15-year-old quarterly run by a three-person staff out of a small office blocks from the White House, may be one of the most influential publications of the post-Trump era.

Six of President Biden’s 25 Cabinet-level officials and appointees, including the secretary of state and the chief of staff, as well as many other high-level administration members, have published essays in its pages, floating theories that may now be translated into policy.

From The Writer’s Almanac:

Today is the birthday of writer Ben Hecht. His books included the novels Erik Dorn and Fantazius Mallare, but he made his fame as a writer for stage and screen.

He ran away from home at 16 to Chicago, where he became a reporter….He used his inside knowledge of the newspaper business as fodder for his play The Front Page, which he co-wrote with Charles MacArthur. The play was later made into a movie by the same name, and adapted again for the screen in His Girl Friday.

From a New York Times By the Book column headlined “Ibram X. Kendi Likes to Read at Bedtime”:

“I don’t remember the last time the pages of a book were not the final thing I saw before departing off for sleep,” says the author, professor and editor, with Keisha Blain, of “Four Hundred Souls: A Community History of African America, 1619-2019.”

What’s the last great book you read?

From a Washington Post story by Sarah Ellison headlined “Marty Baron, Jeff Bezos, Donald Trump and the eight years that reshaped The Washington Post—and journalism”:

It sounded like a riddle, the question the new boss posed to Washington Post Executive Editor Martin Baron in a 2013 meeting.

“Why are you taking the pain,” Amazon founder Jeff Bezos asked Baron and a small group of executives shortly after he purchased the company, “and not taking the gift?”

From a Wall Street Journal ideas column by Alison Gopnik headlined “The Power of a Wandering Mind”:

There’s only one way to write: Just do it. But there seem to be a million ways not to write. I sit down to work on my column, write a sentence and—ping!—there’s a text with a video of my new baby grandson. One more sentence and I start ruminating about the latest virus variant, triggering a bout of obsessive Covid worry. Cut it out! I tell myself, and write one more sentence, and then I’m staring blankly out the window, my mind wandering: What was it with that weird movie last night?…