Letter to the (sub)editor

5 comments on “Letter to the (sub)editor”

1. Ingrid says:
   July 30th, 2008 at 9:34 am

   The icing on the cake is that Giles Coren’s rant was published without using the services of a single subeditor. Note the mistakes… Hilarious.

2. cfg says:
   July 30th, 2008 at 9:48 am

   The rant was “leaked” to the Guardian, on whose blog it appeared. Maybe by Coren himself. But I have to say I feel the guy’s pain. The idea of reaming a snot-nosed editor who insists on mauling my copy is mighty appealing. I once came close to that with an editor of a national magazine.

3. Gorch says:
   July 30th, 2008 at 1:04 pm

   Having worked as an editor myself, I’m highly sympathetic to these two sub-editors when they write: “If you could only see the state of some of the raw copy we have to knock into shape. It’s badly structured, poorly spelt, appallingly punctuated, lazily researched . . .” and “Strange as it may seem, many writers do not possess your grasp of language; indeed it is sometimes difficult to believe that English is their mother tongue, and they don’t give a damn about what they produce because they know that a good, often highly educated sub-editor will correct it, check it and turn it into readable prose.” It’s amazing, the number of talentless enthusiasts out there who get to call themselves writers just because someone has published their writing.

   At the same time, my sympathies lie one hundred per cent behind Giles Coren. That E-mail has been floating around for a while now, leaked with the tacit purpose of embarrassing him. We, like whoever leaked it, are supposed to marvel at his pettiness and his outsized reaction over one little indefinite article. Lost in this is the fact that Coren is absolutely right: it was a shit edit. And it reflected on him, not on the sub-editor who made the edit.

   And besides: what passion! We should thank our lucky stars that there’s a food critic out there who knows his job so well and takes his profession so seriously. I wish everyone, no matter what they do for a living, held themselves accountable to such high standards.

4. pete says:
   July 30th, 2008 at 3:01 pm

   I interviewed Michael Redhill for a daily newspaper (I won’t mention which one; suffice it to say it belongs to a large and ubiquitous Canadian media conglomerate). When I asked what subject matter he might tackle next, Redhill said he has catholic tastes. Someone at the newspaper capitalized the first letter of “catholic.” I hope Redhill didn’t read the piece; he’d have thought I thought he’s into rosaries and holy water.

   On the other hand, during my time as a magazine editor I noticed an inverse proportion between the quality of a writer’s work and the tenacity with which the writer will resist edits. A good writer recognizes good editing and is grateful for it. Many third-rate writers are jealous guardians of their allegedly perfect sentences.

   The trouble is, experiences like Coren’s lost article and my Catholic conversion do take place. Writers bitch about these experiences, as they should. Some bad writers figure that if you presume to tarnish their prose, you must be one of those infamous bad editors. Therefore, in the name of justice for authors everywhere, they defend tooth and nail their dumb or mistake-addled or incomprehensible turns of phrase.

   Dailies, I imagine, don’t have time to indulge these scribes with back-and-forths about delicate changes. So they develop a ruthless touch. The sad upshot: fine style is likely to end up in the collateral damage column.

5. hysperia says:
   August 1st, 2008 at 3:27 am

   Sorry they edited your 9/11 piece. It’s damned fine.

Discuss