8 ms·

You might as well be a great copy editor

144 points by dannas 6y ago

cafard 6y ago
You need to be the reader's advocate, to try to set aside your ego and read your work as if someone else wrote it. This is not substantially different from adjusting your code. One might argue that with code you have also a very demanding reader, the computer, which might fail to run it or wreck something. Still you are writing for a human audience.
- msla 6y ago
  Computers demand formal precision, which is different from conceptual clarity. Every obfuscator (including optimizers) relies on this fact. Good code has both formal precision and conceptual clarity.
chadly 6y ago
Something I've known for a while (but have really come to terms with more recently) is just how important writing skills are even for technical people (even coders). It's hard to get anything done if you can't convince people why they should listen to you. Especially in this increasingly remote-connected world, writing skills are key.
- carlmr 6y ago
  >how important writing skills are even for technical people (even coders). Especially coders. Writing clear programs is a lot like clear writing. A function is like a paragraph of a text. It should meaningfully abstract one concept of your higher level logic. It should be introduced by a clean input from the previous "paragraph", and produce an output that is the input for the next "paragraph". If your higher level function becomes too large, you can create larger structures like sections in writing. Having this ability to mercilessly copy edit, paring down your functions to their core concept and putting them into meaningful context is really useful if you want others to understand your code.
  - tom_mellior 6y ago
    All this that you write about code is correct, but I think you are missing the parent's point. Coders also need to be good at writing non-code text for humans. There is documentation to be written, and bug reports, and proposals for new features, etc. I have colleagues who are brilliant developers, and when they propose something I'm sure their idea is technically sound, yet often I don't understand what they are trying to say because their writing is much poorer than their coding.
    - carlmr 6y ago
      I wouldn't say I'm missing the point. I agree that coders need to know how to write text. My point was that for coders writing is not the thing you do on the side, coding itself IS writing. That's why I said that "even" should be "especially".
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- closeparen 6y ago
  Could not disagree more. Documents are props. They exist to help your stage production evoke feelings of gravitas and rigor, but this is driven more by form than substance. It’s a similar story for large officially scheduled meetings. Real communication happens in the hallway outside just after the official document review, and is pretty much independent of what was in the document.
  - t-writescode 6y ago
    Technical writing is absolutely a skill that developers need to know, among many other kinds of writing and it doesn’t have any gravitas.
fennecfoxen 6y ago
I would like to add a third recommendation to the list of two, and recommend "Style: Towards Clarity and Grace". (Alternatively, use any similar book by Joseph M. Williams featuring the words Style, Clarity, and Grace in the title). This book discusses the information architecture of clear and coherent phrases, sentences and paragraphs in the English language, and a few passes through its contents will leave you able to reason about the way you lay out ideas and information in your writing.
- Tomte 6y ago
  There is a fantastic section that shows why the passive has its uses, and that "avoid passive voice" can be harmful.
  - fennecfoxen 6y ago
    Oh, yes. The passive voice is not simply dismissed in this work as a tool to avoid responsibility. Rather, it takes its place as an important tool that can make paragraphs more coherent, by structuring the sentences to elevate the parts that really matter. The subjects of sentences in this paragraph, for instance, are all strongly related to writing concepts. This paragraph itself would be weakened if I were to begin, "Joseph M Williams promotes the passive voice." Our communication would only be hindered if we were to highlight the incidental matter of his authorship.
    - tom_mellior 6y ago
      That's not a strong argument. The natural "translation" of your first sentence would be something like: "This work does not simply dismiss the passive voice as a tool to avoid responsibility." The author's name doesn't come into it, and there is no reason to transform "does not dismiss" into the much stronger "promotes".
      - fennecfoxen 6y ago
        Well excuse me I am sure the author polished his work over several years. I devoted mere minutes to chatting it up on Hacker News. There's a reason you pay the author for the book and you don't pay me. Let's see you argue something better instead of just taking potshots at people who bother to try, jerk.
WilTimSon 6y ago
Knowing how to tighten the screws on a text is essential for a lot of workplace communication, especially if you're trying to get something from your higher-ups. Don't think everyone is going to take their time to become a great copy editor, but it pays to learn the craft at least a little.
kqr 6y ago
As the joke goes, "an author is someone who wasn't good enough at writing to become an editor."
awillen 6y ago
Back in high school I was the copy editor for the paper (and the minutiae of AP style are still seared into my brain), and it's definitely been a useful skill. My first job was doing developer marketing, and we had a lot of devs that were happy to contribute to our blog but didn't feel their writing was great - a lot of it was just little grammatical and style stuff, so my being able to clean it up really encouraged them to work with me on creating content. That said, I think that reading a book on copy edit just to be able to edit your own stuff is a little bit of overkill. You don't need a deep, sophisticated knowledge of grammar - something like Strunk and White's Elements of Style will cover the grammar stuff you need while also helping to offer a little bit better sense of bigger-picture writing style.
- CapitalistCartr 6y ago
  Strunk and White's Elements of Style is trash; don't buy it, don't read it, don't follow its advice. Read this first: http://www.lel.ed.ac.uk/~gpullum/LandOfTheFree.html http://www.lel.ed.ac.uk/~gpullum/LandOfTheFree.html
  - dhosek 6y ago
    My wife has been reading Charlotte's Web to our kids. I asked her if she was familiar with the Strunk and White Guide and she thought I was asking if she was familiar with the drunken white guy. (For the record, she was familiar with neither.) (And for those who don't know, Charlotte's Web was written by E. B. White who is the White of Strunk and White.)
mewest 6y ago
I was lucky enough to have Prof. Regehr in my masters program. If he says these are good books to look into to improve your editing, trust this guy, he is as good as they get. Now edit this comment for practice!
Wistar 6y ago
NYT's "Copy Edit This" quizzes are quite good. https://www.nytimes.com/search?query=%22copy%2Bedit%2Bthis%22 https://www.nytimes.com/search?query=%22copy%2Bedit%2Bthis%2... https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/11/11/insider/copy-edit-this-quiz.html?searchResultPosition=18 https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/11/11/insider/copy-...
- jimbob45 6y ago
  That was really fun. I got 1 of 15 lol.
  - tasogare 6y ago
    This literally begs the question if people still can write correctly.
    - jamesmaniscalco 6y ago
      I'm not sure if you are being ironic, but this is actually a common misuse of the phrase "begging the question": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Begging_the_question https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Begging_the_question Noting of course that it's probably more common in the "incorrect" form!
- yellowapple 6y ago
  Those are fun. Just got through the first one with 17 total tries (most of which were on the 8th question). Some of them are dubious, though, IMO. For example: > The total amount available to |disperse| will be $150 million annually. I guess in a journalism context more people are talking about disbursing than dispersing, but how am I supposed to know that? For all I know this sentence comes from an article about wanting to "scatter" that money. EDIT: another example from the second quiz: > Republicans will not like many of these proposals, but they have been |fulsome| in their praise of Mr. Trump since his election. Speaker Paul D. Ryan, for instance, has repeatedly said that he expects Mr. Trump to work with Republicans on their agenda of rolling back the Affordable Care Act and making large-scale changes to the tax code and entitlements. The explanation for why "fulsome" is wrong here was that "this word means not just “full” or “abundant” but “offensively excessive.”". How am I supposed to know "offensively excessive" wasn't the intended meaning here? I ended up picking it simply because it came across as a bit too pretentious, but not before I picked "instance" for the same reason ("for instance" instead of "for example" bugs me a bit).
aaroninsf 6y ago
Pro tip, from an actual pro: you can't copyedit your own copy. Lots of reasons why, including, your inability to recognize problems you are unaware of; the inexorable fact of reading what you think you wrote, not what is on the page; inability to see logical problems, missing assumptions, etc. Ad infinitum. There are line-level hacks which can help with some of this, e.g. reading backwards to find typographic and spelling error... ...but there is no general solution. Suggested fix: find a professional peer and become their formal editing buddy. Define terms and scope, this is not peer review–it is simply copy editing.
- gaogao 6y ago
  I actually use the backwards hack for code review too.
- velosol 6y ago
  I agree but have found that I'm better at copyediting my own copy the further I am from it. If I wrote something in the last week I might as well be a spellchecker. If I wrote something last month I will catch more things but not as much as if it were someone else's writing. A year or more and I start to ask "Who on earth wrote this like this?!" :) .
- eequah9L 6y ago
  > reading backwards to find typographic and spelling error... Ha, nice, I will try this out. > find a professional peer and become their formal editing buddy Yeah, teams should have a review system for documentation, like they certainly have one for code review. In practice, with many non-native English speakers in the team (100% in my case), this is something of an issue. But we do what we can :) What tends to help me with long-standing documents in particular is to reread them after some time passes. A couple months down the line, I have lost much of the context, which makes it easier to spot problematic bits. I am also not invested in the text as much, which makes it easier to rip out the parts that have not aged well.
- vonnik 6y ago
  I agree so much with this. You need "cold eyes". One important function of copy editing is to check your assumptions, and make sure everything is explained that needs explaining. That's almost impossible to perform on one's own writing and thought, because everything you know seems obvious, and everything you assume has become the natural and invisible given. Note how many people Paul Graham cites as reading his essays. Lots. Smart people. That's one reason why the essays are so good. It takes a village, or at least a smart friend, to write something good. It doesn't float out of your brain as a perfect work of art.
staysaasy 6y ago
My team went through a major shift a number of years ago, moving most complex discussions to written documents (with commentary!) wherever possible. The outcomes were great and fwiw we had a minimal remote culture pre-pandemic, people would write things down even if they were sitting next to each other. In particular: - It's much easier to track the provenance of complex decisions. - Deciding in docs reduces meeting bloat. - It's harder to get pissed at someone based upon a document. - Anecdotally, points of view seem to be better thought-out. This article made me think of how we should remember to try as hard as possible to adjust for variation in writing skill. I also wonder whether we're inherently biasing against people who are _slower_ writers.
50 6y ago
Is copy editing a viable career?
- joegahona 6y ago
  You have to be very good, because all the jobs are drying up.
mementomori 6y ago
Modifying other people's code is kind of like a severe type of copyediting.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
jeffmcmahan 6y ago
Just wanted to add a book recommendation for copy editing: "Revising Prose" by Lanham. It was recommended by a respected philosopher when I was in undergrad. Excellent.
jdnier 6y ago
A favorite of mine is the book BUGS in Writing, by Lyn Dupré (1998, Addison Wesley). It's a teach-by-example book with lots of examples she rates as ugly, bad, good, and even splendid.
anticristi 6y ago
I'm speaking from the perspective of non-native academic English speakers. I find that my time and the time of my PhD students is better spent focusing on the high-level problems. Once those are fixed, we rely on professional copy-editing. Done!
ivan_ah 6y ago
A very useful trick for copyediting and proofreading is to use a text-to-speech tool. The default voice on Mac is quite good. I use it all the time to proofread intros, and explanation sections in my books. For math-heavy or code-blocks, it's not quite as good... but actually works OK for Python. See [1] for how to setup a keyboard shortcut. [1] https://docs.google.com/document/d/1mApa60zJA8rgEm6T6GF0yIem8qpMmnaBFYOgV32gdMc/edit https://docs.google.com/document/d/1mApa60zJA8rgEm6T6GF0yIem...

144 points by dannas 6y ago

You need to be the reader's advocate, to try to set aside your ego and read your work as if someone else wrote it. This is not substantially different from adjusting your code. One might argue that with code you have also a very demanding reader, the computer, which might fail to run it or wreck something. Still you are writing for a human audience.

msla 6y ago
Computers demand formal precision, which is different from conceptual clarity. Every obfuscator (including optimizers) relies on this fact. Good code has both formal precision and conceptual clarity.

chadly 6y ago

Something I've known for a while (but have really come to terms with more recently) is just how important writing skills are even for technical people (even coders). It's hard to get anything done if you can't convince people why they should listen to you. Especially in this increasingly remote-connected world, writing skills are key.

carlmr 6y ago
>how important writing skills are even for technical people (even coders). Especially coders. Writing clear programs is a lot like clear writing. A function is like a paragraph of a text. It should meaningfully abstract one concept of your higher level logic. It should be introduced by a clean input from the previous "paragraph", and produce an output that is the input for the next "paragraph". If your higher level function becomes too large, you can create larger structures like sections in writing. Having this ability to mercilessly copy edit, paring down your functions to their core concept and putting them into meaningful context is really useful if you want others to understand your code.
- tom_mellior 6y ago
  All this that you write about code is correct, but I think you are missing the parent's point. Coders also need to be good at writing non-code text for humans. There is documentation to be written, and bug reports, and proposals for new features, etc. I have colleagues who are brilliant developers, and when they propose something I'm sure their idea is technically sound, yet often I don't understand what they are trying to say because their writing is much poorer than their coding.
  - carlmr 6y ago
    I wouldn't say I'm missing the point. I agree that coders need to know how to write text. My point was that for coders writing is not the thing you do on the side, coding itself IS writing. That's why I said that "even" should be "especially".
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
closeparen 6y ago
Could not disagree more. Documents are props. They exist to help your stage production evoke feelings of gravitas and rigor, but this is driven more by form than substance. It’s a similar story for large officially scheduled meetings. Real communication happens in the hallway outside just after the official document review, and is pretty much independent of what was in the document.
- t-writescode 6y ago
  Technical writing is absolutely a skill that developers need to know, among many other kinds of writing and it doesn’t have any gravitas.

fennecfoxen 6y ago

I would like to add a third recommendation to the list of two, and recommend "Style: Towards Clarity and Grace". (Alternatively, use any similar book by Joseph M. Williams featuring the words Style, Clarity, and Grace in the title). This book discusses the information architecture of clear and coherent phrases, sentences and paragraphs in the English language, and a few passes through its contents will leave you able to reason about the way you lay out ideas and information in your writing.

Tomte 6y ago
There is a fantastic section that shows why the passive has its uses, and that "avoid passive voice" can be harmful.
- fennecfoxen 6y ago
  Oh, yes. The passive voice is not simply dismissed in this work as a tool to avoid responsibility. Rather, it takes its place as an important tool that can make paragraphs more coherent, by structuring the sentences to elevate the parts that really matter. The subjects of sentences in this paragraph, for instance, are all strongly related to writing concepts. This paragraph itself would be weakened if I were to begin, "Joseph M Williams promotes the passive voice." Our communication would only be hindered if we were to highlight the incidental matter of his authorship.
  - tom_mellior 6y ago
    That's not a strong argument. The natural "translation" of your first sentence would be something like: "This work does not simply dismiss the passive voice as a tool to avoid responsibility." The author's name doesn't come into it, and there is no reason to transform "does not dismiss" into the much stronger "promotes".
    - fennecfoxen 6y ago
      Well excuse me I am sure the author polished his work over several years. I devoted mere minutes to chatting it up on Hacker News. There's a reason you pay the author for the book and you don't pay me. Let's see you argue something better instead of just taking potshots at people who bother to try, jerk.

WilTimSon 6y ago

Knowing how to tighten the screws on a text is essential for a lot of workplace communication, especially if you're trying to get something from your higher-ups. Don't think everyone is going to take their time to become a great copy editor, but it pays to learn the craft at least a little.

kqr 6y ago

As the joke goes, "an author is someone who wasn't good enough at writing to become an editor."

awillen 6y ago

Back in high school I was the copy editor for the paper (and the minutiae of AP style are still seared into my brain), and it's definitely been a useful skill. My first job was doing developer marketing, and we had a lot of devs that were happy to contribute to our blog but didn't feel their writing was great - a lot of it was just little grammatical and style stuff, so my being able to clean it up really encouraged them to work with me on creating content. That said, I think that reading a book on copy edit just to be able to edit your own stuff is a little bit of overkill. You don't need a deep, sophisticated knowledge of grammar - something like Strunk and White's Elements of Style will cover the grammar stuff you need while also helping to offer a little bit better sense of bigger-picture writing style.

CapitalistCartr 6y ago
Strunk and White's Elements of Style is trash; don't buy it, don't read it, don't follow its advice. Read this first: http://www.lel.ed.ac.uk/~gpullum/LandOfTheFree.html http://www.lel.ed.ac.uk/~gpullum/LandOfTheFree.html
- dhosek 6y ago
  My wife has been reading Charlotte's Web to our kids. I asked her if she was familiar with the Strunk and White Guide and she thought I was asking if she was familiar with the drunken white guy. (For the record, she was familiar with neither.) (And for those who don't know, Charlotte's Web was written by E. B. White who is the White of Strunk and White.)

mewest 6y ago

I was lucky enough to have Prof. Regehr in my masters program. If he says these are good books to look into to improve your editing, trust this guy, he is as good as they get. Now edit this comment for practice!

Wistar 6y ago

NYT's "Copy Edit This" quizzes are quite good. https://www.nytimes.com/search?query=%22copy%2Bedit%2Bthis%22 https://www.nytimes.com/search?query=%22copy%2Bedit%2Bthis%2... https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/11/11/insider/copy-edit-this-quiz.html?searchResultPosition=18 https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/11/11/insider/copy-...

jimbob45 6y ago
That was really fun. I got 1 of 15 lol.
- tasogare 6y ago
  This literally begs the question if people still can write correctly.
  - jamesmaniscalco 6y ago
    I'm not sure if you are being ironic, but this is actually a common misuse of the phrase "begging the question": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Begging_the_question https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Begging_the_question Noting of course that it's probably more common in the "incorrect" form!
yellowapple 6y ago
Those are fun. Just got through the first one with 17 total tries (most of which were on the 8th question). Some of them are dubious, though, IMO. For example: > The total amount available to |disperse| will be $150 million annually. I guess in a journalism context more people are talking about disbursing than dispersing, but how am I supposed to know that? For all I know this sentence comes from an article about wanting to "scatter" that money. EDIT: another example from the second quiz: > Republicans will not like many of these proposals, but they have been |fulsome| in their praise of Mr. Trump since his election. Speaker Paul D. Ryan, for instance, has repeatedly said that he expects Mr. Trump to work with Republicans on their agenda of rolling back the Affordable Care Act and making large-scale changes to the tax code and entitlements. The explanation for why "fulsome" is wrong here was that "this word means not just “full” or “abundant” but “offensively excessive.”". How am I supposed to know "offensively excessive" wasn't the intended meaning here? I ended up picking it simply because it came across as a bit too pretentious, but not before I picked "instance" for the same reason ("for instance" instead of "for example" bugs me a bit).

aaroninsf 6y ago

Pro tip, from an actual pro: you can't copyedit your own copy. Lots of reasons why, including, your inability to recognize problems you are unaware of; the inexorable fact of reading what you think you wrote, not what is on the page; inability to see logical problems, missing assumptions, etc. Ad infinitum. There are line-level hacks which can help with some of this, e.g. reading backwards to find typographic and spelling error... ...but there is no general solution. Suggested fix: find a professional peer and become their formal editing buddy. Define terms and scope, this is not peer review–it is simply copy editing.

gaogao 6y ago
I actually use the backwards hack for code review too.
velosol 6y ago
I agree but have found that I'm better at copyediting my own copy the further I am from it. If I wrote something in the last week I might as well be a spellchecker. If I wrote something last month I will catch more things but not as much as if it were someone else's writing. A year or more and I start to ask "Who on earth wrote this like this?!" :) .
eequah9L 6y ago
> reading backwards to find typographic and spelling error... Ha, nice, I will try this out. > find a professional peer and become their formal editing buddy Yeah, teams should have a review system for documentation, like they certainly have one for code review. In practice, with many non-native English speakers in the team (100% in my case), this is something of an issue. But we do what we can :) What tends to help me with long-standing documents in particular is to reread them after some time passes. A couple months down the line, I have lost much of the context, which makes it easier to spot problematic bits. I am also not invested in the text as much, which makes it easier to rip out the parts that have not aged well.
vonnik 6y ago
I agree so much with this. You need "cold eyes". One important function of copy editing is to check your assumptions, and make sure everything is explained that needs explaining. That's almost impossible to perform on one's own writing and thought, because everything you know seems obvious, and everything you assume has become the natural and invisible given. Note how many people Paul Graham cites as reading his essays. Lots. Smart people. That's one reason why the essays are so good. It takes a village, or at least a smart friend, to write something good. It doesn't float out of your brain as a perfect work of art.

staysaasy 6y ago

My team went through a major shift a number of years ago, moving most complex discussions to written documents (with commentary!) wherever possible. The outcomes were great and fwiw we had a minimal remote culture pre-pandemic, people would write things down even if they were sitting next to each other. In particular: - It's much easier to track the provenance of complex decisions. - Deciding in docs reduces meeting bloat. - It's harder to get pissed at someone based upon a document. - Anecdotally, points of view seem to be better thought-out. This article made me think of how we should remember to try as hard as possible to adjust for variation in writing skill. I also wonder whether we're inherently biasing against people who are _slower_ writers.

50 6y ago

Is copy editing a viable career?

joegahona 6y ago
You have to be very good, because all the jobs are drying up.

mementomori 6y ago

Modifying other people's code is kind of like a severe type of copyediting.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

jeffmcmahan 6y ago

Just wanted to add a book recommendation for copy editing: "Revising Prose" by Lanham. It was recommended by a respected philosopher when I was in undergrad. Excellent.

jdnier 6y ago

A favorite of mine is the book BUGS in Writing, by Lyn Dupré (1998, Addison Wesley). It's a teach-by-example book with lots of examples she rates as ugly, bad, good, and even splendid.

anticristi 6y ago

I'm speaking from the perspective of non-native academic English speakers. I find that my time and the time of my PhD students is better spent focusing on the high-level problems. Once those are fixed, we rely on professional copy-editing. Done!

ivan_ah 6y ago

A very useful trick for copyediting and proofreading is to use a text-to-speech tool. The default voice on Mac is quite good. I use it all the time to proofread intros, and explanation sections in my books. For math-heavy or code-blocks, it's not quite as good... but actually works OK for Python. See [1] for how to setup a keyboard shortcut. [1] https://docs.google.com/document/d/1mApa60zJA8rgEm6T6GF0yIem8qpMmnaBFYOgV32gdMc/edit https://docs.google.com/document/d/1mApa60zJA8rgEm6T6GF0yIem...