All Writers Need an Editor

Our area’s long-shuttered Sears store will reopen soon as the county’s new high school vocational-technical center. So the news I noticed recently about Amazon producing a holiday gift guide—when the once-ubiquitous Sears catalogue is history—had a distinctly counter-cultural feel.

I wonder how you get one of those catalogues? I thought.

The next day, the answer showed up in my mailbox.

As I thumbed through it, on page 4 I noticed a major “oops.” On the lower half of the page sat a photo of the Fire HD 10 tablet. But the product description at the bottom was for the Fire Max 11 tablet.

Before you accuse me of being a nitpicker throwing stones at an easy target, I mention this because I can relate to such faux pas.

Over the years,  I have made numerous mistakes that wound up in print. One example is (several times) misspelling a person’s name, even when it was spelled correctly in an email or website listing.

In journalism school in college, such an infraction resulted in an automatic F. You’d have thought I would have learned my lesson.

A Fresh Memory

While it’s been many years since I mangled a word in one of my blogs, the memory is as fresh as yesterday.

I had been struggling with anger at an elusive source for a story on deadline, putting me under severe pressure. Then I edited a chapter in a business consultant’s book.

In advising a client ready to fire someone over their failures, the consultant quoted Proverbs 16:32: “He who is slow to anger is better than the mighty, and he who rules his spirit than he who takes a city” (MEV).

Instead of firing the employee, the consultant advised his client to try more coaching to help the woman improve.

What hit me between the eyes was my need to follow the wisdom of Proverbs 16:32.

Soon after, I wrote a blog about how this had played out in my life. Since the consultant had played a key role in the situation, I emailed him the link.

An hour or two later, he wrote back, “This is a great piece, but I think you might want to change a word in the third paragraph.”

Second Pair of Eyes

I looked and—sure enough—I had used the wrong word in the first sentence. Fortunately, I alerted my web maven, who quickly corrected the mistake. But I said to myself, “I have got to get somebody else to read these before they are posted.”

I quickly emailed a fellow freelancer, asking if he were interested in a trade-off: If he would edit my blogs, I would edit his.

Ever since, we have saved each other embarrassment.

I relate this to advise would-be authors who are thinking of writing a book: you need an editor.

While I don’t claim to be an expert, I have seen enough substandard productions in my career to know when an author has failed to get a professional edit.

Misspelled words on the title page or the first page of text are an obvious giveaway. So is repeatedly spelling Bible with a small b.

If you haven’t done so, check out Stephen King’s On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft. Not only is it a well-written guide, I admired his humility in including rough drafts of his previous novels that needed serious polishing.

This demonstrates the value of an editor. If someone with a gazillion copies of their work in print needs a second pair of eyes on their work, so do you.