About Editing and Writing

President Trump “misspelled ‘counsel’ three times and had five errors in the span of 280 characters. As journalists and others poked fun at the mistakes, the president quickly deleted the tweet and posted an edited version. He successfully changed ‘wether’ to ‘whether’ and eliminated an inadvertent repeat of the word ‘the’—but he failed to correct three inaccurate references to the title of his nemesis, Robert S. Mueller III.”

—Washington Post story, “A casualty of Trump’s White House: Spelling,” March 22, 2018
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I walk our dog every morning to a nearby park that’s close enough to an affluent neighborhood that one of the dog walkers is among the richest men in the nation’s capital. He’s a real estate developer; he builds big condo and apartment buildings in the Washington suburbs.

It is better to have a permanent income than to be fascinating.
—Oscar Wilde

The more reporters at an event, the less news.

It’s such a fine line between stupid and clever.
—This Is Spinal Tap

Narrative is the social reconstruction of reality.

History does not repeat itself but it often rhymes.
—Mark Twain

If it’s not catered it’s not journalism.

More good journalists have been ruined by self-importance than by alcohol.
—Frank Cobb

The best journalism is done by talking to people who don’t want to talk to you.

By Bill O’Sullivan

Washingtonian senior managing editor Bill O’Sullivan.

Copyeditors do more than fix grammar, spelling, and punctuation. They solve problems every hour of every day and plant the flag for good English and clear writing—a worthy goal in the age of emoticons and Twitter shorthand. They save writers and the publications they work for from embarrassment.

A copyeditor asks questions and makes suggestions that, for whatever reason during the editing process, no matter how good the assigning editors are, never got asked or suggested: What do you mean? Who is this person ID’d by only a last name? That last sentence doesn’t add much—it might be stronger to end with the previous one. This sounds choppy. Oh, and nice lede.

Gene McCarthy, a Minnesota college professor who became a U.S. Senator, was a wise observer of Washington politics. Here he describes the difference between Viable and Non-Viable Alternatives.

Distinguishing between the Viable and the Non-Viable Alternative is a formidable challenge. It is comparable between poisonous and non-poisonous mushrooms.

Non-Viable Alternatives, as a rule, are not difficult to find. They usually hang around, hoping to be noticed. They sit with arms folded and will not be budged. They tend to be stumbled over.

A young Tom Wolfe at the typewriter.

Tom Wolfe, one of the leaders of the New Journalism movement that started in the 1960s, explained it this way:

1. Scene-by-scene construction resorting as little as possible to historical narrative.

2. Realistic dialogue which defines character quicker and more effectively.

3. Third-person point of view, presenting scenes through the eyes of a character, giving the feeling of being inside the character’s mind.

4. Recording gestures, habits, manners, decorations, looks, poses—what amount to symbolic details.

From a Tim Noah post on Facebook about opinion pieces in the New York Times:

The basic problem is that so few of the NYT’s signed opinion pieces are any good. Not that they’re “right” or “wrong,” which matters less than everyone thinks. But that they aren’t good.

I’m all for diversity, in both the multicultural sense and the let-conservatives-have-their-say sense. But the first consideration in hiring columnists and “contributing writers” should be quality.

It’s amazing to me that the most powerful newspaper in the world tolerates so much mediocrity on its op-ed page. Not a new problem, I should note.

The idea of service journalism is to help the reader decide what’s worth doing or seeing or buying and the role of the editor of service pieces is to put yourself in the shoes of the reader: Is the writing clear? Is the tone helpful? Sort of like advice from a good neighbor.

What I sometimes found, and fixed, was service writing I thought was almost Germanic in tone: “You must do this…”