9 ms·

My grad school teachers would kick my butt for writing like that. Look at this lede. "The trouble with CIA writing is much the same trouble that there is with

My grad school teachers would kick my butt for writing like that. Look at this lede. "The trouble with CIA writing is much the same trouble that there is with other governmental writing and with writing generally in the United States." How about "CIA writing baffles our readers. We share this problem with other parts of government and the United States at large." Check out this sentence. "CIA's problem is unique only in the relation of our profession to our writing but this relation is important, for it lends itself to bad writing and if we do not write well we risk losing valuable information and wasting dangerous effort." WTF? I think this writer means "At CIA we write about hard-won information. We lose that information and waste our agency's work when we write badly." Look, it's easier to be an editor than a writer. Everybody knows that. It's always easy to cherrypick a sentence or two and make them better. The point is this: good writing isn't a solitary job; it takes editors as well as writers. It's like software, which takes coders and testers.

jamesrcole 9y ago
> The point is this: good writing isn't a solitary job; it takes editors as well as writers. That's an empirical claim, and I'm wondering how often it is actually true. I have no doubt that for many people, and probably most people, it is true. But how many people out there can (and do) write well without an editor?
- voidhorse 9y ago
  They exist. They are called writers who know how to edit. Most writers need editors because of the two d's: 1. Distance 2. Deadlines Distance is necessary to read your work as a reader and not a writer. In order to polish your writing you have to have an insane amount of empathy for your reader. It's hard for people to edit their own work because it's hard to forget what you know. You know what you've meant by a phrase, of course, but your reader, coming from who knows what background, may not. Your diction, metaphors, etc. may be more idiosyncratic, arcane, limited, or just plain confusing than you realize. We're talking a whole tabula rasa situation which is not easy to pull off. As to our second d, deadlines, they prevent writers from being able to address the first d alone. As with any art, critiquing your own work from the perspective of the audience takes 'fresh eyes', 'fresh ears'--when you're grinding on a piece you become so involved it's hard to look at it from the audiences perspective unless you have sufficient time (sometimes months) to step away and get your brain out of creative/obsessive mode. you're blessed if you actually have the time to simply take off from your writing like this. As such, an editor is your stand in--a set of fresh eyes that can vouch for the audience while you keep grinding away and ensure your hit that deadline.
samirillian 9y ago
Haha, yeah, I was thinking the same thing. Just give your operatives Strunk&White and be done with it.
- zimpenfish 9y ago
  Although I'd check out what actual grammarians and linguists think of S&W before doing that (hint: they're not fans)
  - AnimalMuppet 9y ago
    Well, I'd check out how well grammarians and linguists write before I worry about their opinion of S&W...
  - samirillian 9y ago
    Huh, what do they have against it? I could see a linguist considering it too prescriptive, but in this case the whole point is prescribing a particular register of the language for effective communication. But what about the grammarians?
    - zimpenfish 9y ago
      Things like "Don't use the passive voice" whilst using the passive voice in the same paragraph and other egregious grammatical errors sprinkled wildly through the text. Basically the same kind of dumb and wrong prescriptivism the linguists and dictionaryists hate about it.
zmonx 9y ago
Personally, I think these edits do not preserve the meaning of the original quotes: The changed sentences stress different things than the original quotes to the extent that one could call them distortions rather than edits. From my own experience, I have seen extraordinary writers, but I have never seen an extraordinary editor: I think the reason for this is that exceptionally great editors work in such a way that their own edits most explicitly convey the original work both in its form and in its spirit, so that the editor becomes almost invisible. Invariably, the more bragging I have seen from editors in prefaces etc. about their own work on some books, the worse the result has looked to me in the sense that it had very little to do with the original, and typically felt worse to me. I think good editing is at least as hard as good writing, probably even more so because as an editor, you are working subject to more constraints, in addition to facing the same challenges that writers also face.
- tkxxx7 9y ago
  On the one hand I agree with you about editing being harder. On the other hand, and having been an editor in the past, I can that overall it is much easier. Working within the writer's constraints is usually less difficult than trying to figure out what the constraints should be in the first place. As an editor it can actually feel pretty empowering to slash away any final barriers between the writer's intended message and the audience. And, yes, good editing is invisible. It's a very good feeling, when you can discover the author's original mindspace, and hack away at it.

jamesrcole 9y ago

> The point is this: good writing isn't a solitary job; it takes editors as well as writers. That's an empirical claim, and I'm wondering how often it is actually true. I have no doubt that for many people, and probably most people, it is true. But how many people out there can (and do) write well without an editor?

voidhorse 9y ago
They exist. They are called writers who know how to edit. Most writers need editors because of the two d's: 1. Distance 2. Deadlines Distance is necessary to read your work as a reader and not a writer. In order to polish your writing you have to have an insane amount of empathy for your reader. It's hard for people to edit their own work because it's hard to forget what you know. You know what you've meant by a phrase, of course, but your reader, coming from who knows what background, may not. Your diction, metaphors, etc. may be more idiosyncratic, arcane, limited, or just plain confusing than you realize. We're talking a whole tabula rasa situation which is not easy to pull off. As to our second d, deadlines, they prevent writers from being able to address the first d alone. As with any art, critiquing your own work from the perspective of the audience takes 'fresh eyes', 'fresh ears'--when you're grinding on a piece you become so involved it's hard to look at it from the audiences perspective unless you have sufficient time (sometimes months) to step away and get your brain out of creative/obsessive mode. you're blessed if you actually have the time to simply take off from your writing like this. As such, an editor is your stand in--a set of fresh eyes that can vouch for the audience while you keep grinding away and ensure your hit that deadline.

samirillian 9y ago

Haha, yeah, I was thinking the same thing. Just give your operatives Strunk&White and be done with it.

zimpenfish 9y ago
Although I'd check out what actual grammarians and linguists think of S&W before doing that (hint: they're not fans)
- AnimalMuppet 9y ago
  Well, I'd check out how well grammarians and linguists write before I worry about their opinion of S&W...
- samirillian 9y ago
  Huh, what do they have against it? I could see a linguist considering it too prescriptive, but in this case the whole point is prescribing a particular register of the language for effective communication. But what about the grammarians?
  - zimpenfish 9y ago
    Things like "Don't use the passive voice" whilst using the passive voice in the same paragraph and other egregious grammatical errors sprinkled wildly through the text. Basically the same kind of dumb and wrong prescriptivism the linguists and dictionaryists hate about it.

zmonx 9y ago

Personally, I think these edits do not preserve the meaning of the original quotes: The changed sentences stress different things than the original quotes to the extent that one could call them distortions rather than edits. From my own experience, I have seen extraordinary writers, but I have never seen an extraordinary editor: I think the reason for this is that exceptionally great editors work in such a way that their own edits most explicitly convey the original work both in its form and in its spirit, so that the editor becomes almost invisible. Invariably, the more bragging I have seen from editors in prefaces etc. about their own work on some books, the worse the result has looked to me in the sense that it had very little to do with the original, and typically felt worse to me. I think good editing is at least as hard as good writing, probably even more so because as an editor, you are working subject to more constraints, in addition to facing the same challenges that writers also face.

tkxxx7 9y ago
On the one hand I agree with you about editing being harder. On the other hand, and having been an editor in the past, I can that overall it is much easier. Working within the writer's constraints is usually less difficult than trying to figure out what the constraints should be in the first place. As an editor it can actually feel pretty empowering to slash away any final barriers between the writer's intended message and the audience. And, yes, good editing is invisible. It's a very good feeling, when you can discover the author's original mindspace, and hack away at it.