As a journalism student back in the days before I started popping gray hairs, I used to dread “editing.” I had just crafted a masterpiece. I was certain the Pulitzer committee was going to laud my latest work on intramural volleyball or the college women’s soccer team.
And then, I sat next to someone older and wiser than I and watched my story be torn to bits. The stories would be full of Associated Press Style mistakes. Being masterpieces, they would be fitted with some strangely awkward sentence constructions, which caused their demise. And the passive voice constructions which were paramount in my stories was very noticeable.
Of course, they weren’t noticeable when I wrote it. Nor were they the 20 times I read it.
But very quickly, my AP style mistakes were corrected right before my eyes. We smoothed out the awkward sentence constructions and rid ourselves of passive voice.
They were very painful. To my 19-year-old self, it felt like my handiwork was being mercilessly ripped to shreds by some ruthless, cold, heartless heathen making two bucks an hour.
However, it was very valuable. I learned more about how to write good, clean, tight stories from those editing sessions, and ever since, I’ve believed very strongly in editing stories with your staff. Early in the year, I require my page editors to do just that, often with myself in tow.
It’s painful. We’re teaching young journalists how to learn the craft, how to write and how to create a voice. I tell my students that every editing mark, every comment on a story is meant to be constructive and build them up. It’s to help them become better writers, better reporters and better journalists. In one of my first instances, a budding editorial writer put together her first column. It was a screed that had little context to back up the points the writer was making. It had some good ideas, but wasn’t focused and didn’t back up the points the writer was trying to make.
As our editorial team – with myself joining them – calmly pointed these things out in the edits, the writer nodded and agreed with us. And I looked up and saw tears rolling down the writer’s face. The process was painful – but with a happy ending. The writer focused the column, backed up the fewer points that were being made and put together a great column. That writer became our go-to columnist the rest of the year.
Yesterday, the shoe was on the other foot. For the first time since those college days, I was sitting in the chair next to the editor, watching my finely crafted work torn to shreds.
OK, it wasn’t finely crafted. It was terrible – full of awkward transitions, needless quotes, redundancies and, quite frankly, too many words. It was the first story I had attempted to write since coming to the IBJ four weeks ago – a business feature that is slotted for next week’s publication. It had gone through about 20 drafts and revisions as I tried to fix, hone, craft and re-work the story into a masterpiece. Instead, I subconsciously thought “I’m in the big leagues now, I have to write a masterpiece.” So I overwrote and instead of impressing everyone, I impressed nobody. That’s often what happens when you try to overwrite Those things happen whether they be using too many big words and overexplaining things, masking overt opinions as analysis or other common mistakes students make when they know their friends are going to see their work.
Despite all of those drafts and revisions, I didn’t see all of the story’s problems – the passive voice, the awkward constructions, the awful transitions, the redundancies and repetitiveness. That is, until I sat down with an editor and we went through the story line-by-line. We tightened things up, rewrote several paragraphs, reworked the lede, turned passive into active voice and suddenly, I was doing the editing. I was telling the editor all of the problems and mistakes that I saw.
The result turned into a much better, cleaner, tighter story that I hope is worthy to be published in a publication of the IBJ’s caliber. And it helped me see some of the problems in my other stories, so they too can be better, cleaner and tighter.
Sitting next to someone with fresh eyes sometimes does wonders for your ability to see your own work in a different light. It’s an important part of the editing – and educational – process. Edit stories with your writers at first, and train (and require) your editors to do the same.
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