“The universe needs more good editors,” Kurt Vonnegut wrote in a letter to his students. He added, “God knows.”
Vonnegut was right. Last summer, someone sent me a photo of the front page of the Kennebec Journal,
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“The universe needs more good editors,” Kurt Vonnegut wrote in a letter to his students. He added, “God knows.”
Vonnegut was right. Last summer, someone sent me a photo of the front page of the Kennebec Journal, “Maine’s oldest newspaper, founded in 1825.” It had a headline about North Korea that read: “Trump warns of ‘fire and furry.’” Hundreds of readers must have seen what the editorial desk later called “a mortifying typo.”
More recently, Twitter erupted over an error in another headline:
The writer meant boulders, of course. Someone tweeted: “Nature is truly amazing.”
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It is sometimes said that religious converts have a stronger faith than the people born into a religion. It might be the same with immigrants. I wasn’t born into the English language and came to it rather late. Using it well — with fire and furry, so to speak — is a point of honor.
To me, copy editors have God’s hand. They tighten my style and untangle mixed-up facts. They prevent word-usage blunders. I can’t count the times they have saved me from embarrassment in my writing. In a manuscript page, to this day I might still confuse “where” for “were” or “wear,” “in line” and “on line.”
The copy-edited manuscript of my first book in English, written before the process was done electronically, arrived with tons of sticky notes. I had the impression that every single line was being questioned. A couple of days later, the in-house editor called me to apologize. The copy editor he had hired clearly suffered from obsessive/compulsive disorder. But perhaps all copy editors are a little bit OCD.
I thought of the cultural differences between English- and Spanish-language publishing. In Spanish, editors never meddle with the text; it goes against protocol. You write what you write; readers should see it without adulteration. It is well-known that Borges’s essays and stories in the Buenos Aires magazine Sur were obsessively marked by him, as Daniel Balderston shows in his recent book How Borges Wrote, but hardly at all by an editor. The magazine’s editor, José Bianco, was famously polite, meaning unintrusive even by Hispanic standards. Likewise, the difference between Gabriel García Márquez’s manuscript of One Hundred Years of Solitude and the printed pages is almost nonexistent. No hand of God.
This applies even in journalism. Whenever I publish something in a Mexican newspaper, it appears verbatim. It is the opposite of my experience as a columnist for The New York Times’s Spanish edition, where each monthly piece undergoes excruciating scrutiny. I get at least three, sometimes four, versions of the piece before it is published. The back-and-forth makes sure that every word, every period is just right.
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In a recent column, in which I made a case for eliminating the silent h in Spanish, the copy editor and I discussed words like hay (there is) and ay (ouch!), and hasta (until) and asta (mast). We especially debated my last sentence: “Es ora de que el idioma sea no solamente ermoso sino coerente (it is time for the language to be not only beautiful but coherent), in which all the h’s are dropped. The exchange was sometimes heated. By the time it was over, we had forged a friendship based on emails in which we dropped all the h’s.
The Times is a rarity. American media is under duress, and the result is the slow disappearance of copy editors. Four years ago The New Republic asked me to write a blog during the World Cup as the games were taking place. I accepted with pleasure, in part because of my love for the game, but also because of the magazine’s long tradition of excellence. The staff at the time may have been nervous about the magazine’s new owner, who would shake up the editorial staff a few months later. Maybe that’s why my editors had such scattered attention spans. An emailed text would automatically become a published text: no queries, no changes. As I’d watch the next game, I’d find myself texting with the commissioning editor, asking her to polish a sentence half of the readership had already seen.
On occasion, of course, I have ignored a sharp copy editor’s suggestion — to my detriment. My book Quixote: The Novel and the World includes a sentence about the word quixotic being almost the only adjective coming from a literary character that has become a way to describe a feature of reality. When I first published that particular line, a copy editor asked if I was certain. (Copy editors are wary of superlatives, and of words like only.) But the book contains it, which has prompted a dozen or so attentive readers to send me letters about words like gargantuan,Falstaffian, and others. I should have known.
All this is to say that I am grateful for my copy editors. They are my conscience. The fact that they look at what I write once, twice, as many times as needed, makes me feel secure. The copy editors at The Chronicle, who have edited my work for years, are the perfect example. They are behind this very sentence, or maybe ahead of it, in ways the reader will not see. Their “absent presence” grants me confidence. Of course, all mistakes are not those of any copy editors but mine alone. God knows.