Before my internet addiction distracted me from it, I made a sport of writing letters to newspapers, and my success rate for over a decade was about 8/10 published to submitted. I had one or two in the Economist, with many more in the Financial Times, and others in lesser known papers. They're all in a drawer somewhere now as some very humble personal trophies.

However, my final one was edited so horrendously and offensively in print that the only charitable interpretation was that English was not the letters editor's first language. After a few emails back and forth, and the terse revelation from a very piqued editor that English was in fact her first language, she graciously corrected the online version. My advice to anyone who wants emulate the house style of The Economist is that they should read P.G. Wodehouse first.

I stopped writing letters after that because it signalled a shift in culture at the papers, where the people working for them didn't seem to have the same relationship to truth they once appeared to. The feeling of opening that salmon coloured paper to find your letter in it (with only modest surprise) and giving your morning coffee a smug celebratory sip is one of the things upvotes on the internet have not yet been able to replace.

Sir, I'm dismayed to learn that you have developed an addiction to the InterWebs. I would have expected the business model of said Webs (arrant nonsense + commcercial surveillance) to repel you as it repels any civilised mind.

That said, I personally have learned nothing from the Economist either. Wodehousian style or not.

I recommend Stephen Leacock. Yours etc...

Heh, heh. As a physicist, I wrote the entire technical section on polarization for my small company’s optics catalog. It got “edited” by the personnel manager, a UT Austin English major who was not dumb. Almost had a coronary at age 36.

I had to run a job ad for a programmer so I took the template provided by HR, added my list of buzzwords and acronyms, and corrected the many factual, grammatical, and spelling errors in the original document.

They ran my ad but the only part that varied from the template was my list if "tech skills". Unfortunately, this meant the job ad was "pre-covid" so it stated we do not work remotely, you must be local, etc. Sigh.

I wonder how many companies have optics catalogs. I needed a mirror with a reflective front surface (instead of inside or on the back where the light has to go through the glass on a normal mirror) to do what they did in Tim’s Vermeer (the simple mirror version, not the full lens version, although that would be cool if I can figure out the parts I need). Anyway, they (Edmunds) later sent me a full catalog with all kinds of laser stuff I don’t understand with detailed educational information about them and how to set up proper measurement systems and so on.

Even in this short sample comment I enjoyed your writing. And I agree, that sounds much more satisfying than updoots

I'm mightily confused by the downvotes for the compliment i wrote

My guess: it's the word "updoot" that people are downvoting.

Discussion about the voting on comments is generally discouraged[0]:

"Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Now THIS person writes.

we do. all letters sent in by emailed in get the following autoreply:

"The Economist thanks you for your letter, which has been passed to the author of the article. All letters are edited if selected for publication either in print or online.

We will need to know where you are writing from, so please ensure you have supplied the name of the city, town or village and the country if that is not obvious.

If you do not wish your letter to be published send an e-mail promptly to [email protected]."

I'm surprised GP didn't expect that the letter would be edited.

One of my letters was published. I fully expected that it would be edited and was pleased with the result. You can see both versions here - https://gist.github.com/nindalf/12a533f6ff64d7f146845f289acd.... I thought the edited version conveys the intent well.

Thanks for sharing the comparison!

I think I agree, the edited version conveys the meaning and intent well. I assume the links were removed as a matter of form factor/medium.

That's really interesting. Thanks for sharing.

Seconded!

I agree that this is smart editing that preserves the original meaning well. The one decision I question is simplifying your nicely-phrased “Most programmers spend most of their time attaching these disparate blocks together” to just “most programmers spend their time [...]”

If I was King: Default assumption that statements are generalizations, unless explicitly stated otherwise. To preempt pedantry.

eg

Programmers => Programmers in general, with many obvious exceptions, too numerous to list in a brief reply.

All Programmers => All Programmers

PS- Hmmm. Now I wonder if any style guides cover this? Surely some do.

I suppose insisting on both “most”s is a bit pedantic, but I also think it’s nice rhetoric -- reminds me of “you can fool all of the people some of the time, and some of the people all of the time.”

Disclosed to the reader, not to the letter writer.

Yes, that was my point and I should have made it better.

(Also, there's a difference between editing and rewriting.)

Every newspaper that I've ever read does this. There will be a blurb on the letters page saying something like "We reserve the right to edit letters". It's clear to both readers and correspondents.

If you don't like the terms, don't engage.

Edited to add: newspapers in the UK take libel law seriously so you have some confidence they won't grossly misrepresent your views.

It still doesn't make sense to attribute to a reader some words they didn't write.

Also there's a difference between the expectation that the letter can be truncated or just the gist of it extracted for reasons of space, and entire sentences or paragraphs rewritten in full. I would have never expected the latter even with a "right to edit letters reserved" disclaimer.

The problem is that a letter that makes an excellent point might not make it with the required berevity and clarity.

A letter to the editor might read:

> I saw on your article about the size of foodstuffs that food items are not getting smaller - actually people are just getting bigger. Very interesting article, quite funny and relevant as I've been collecting food items since I was a child and can confirm that this isn't always true. I've got a few exapmles where it holds, but I also have a kit kat from when I was 18 (born 1979) that used to be 500g and now they are 250g as standard. I'm a big fan and this is the first time I have spotted a huge glaring error! Please explain that one!

Clearly that would need to be reframed. I'm not particularly good, but I can see why a newspaper might want to shorten it:

> In last week's article The Economist argued that foodstuffs were not getting smaller, however I own a standard kit-kat from the 1997 that is double the size of ones available in shops today. Thoughts?

The above is probably an improvement from a readers perspective, conveys the points of the original message, and they aren't usually attributed to a specific, identifiable person anyway (usually something like John from London) so I don't think there is any huge scandal here.

That's what editors do. Everything you have read in a published book, magazine, or newspaper has been edited and often substantially rewritten by someone whose name is not on the cover or byline. Letters pages aren't comment threads; they're part of the publication and that means they're edited for style and content, just like everything else.

(As someone who writes for a living, I can tell you that it takes a little getting used to, especially when an editor butchers a sentence you're pleased with. But it's part of the process you learn to accept eventually — and they were probably right.)

How I miss the days of reading text that has been edited. Today's websites seem to have completely eliminated the editing stage before release. One of my big pet peeves is when multiple authors are contributing where you're reading the article, and then the next author's section comes in recapping what you've just read like it was meant to be another stand alone article. There is so much redundant information that an editor would have caught easily. It also implies to me that nobody is actually reading the article about to be released from start to end, nor do they read it aloud. That was a proofreading tip from long ago as it makes the mind slow down instead of auto-correcting when reading quietly.

Katha Pollitt in a 1997 panel discussion discussing the difference in writing relatively unedited for (comparatively) small-circ publications such as The Nation and the heavily-edited, mass-market, advertising-friendly world of Glamour.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=fkLX58ZWbWw&t=14m20s

(From 14m20s -- 16m30s)

Yes, and while I generally get given final review on things these days, if I were working on a publication with tight deadlines, I wouldn't expect that. And I mostly don't do a great job with headlines anyway so I'm mostly happy to have editors throw away whatever I put in as a placeholder :-)

I do occasionally revert changes when I'm reviewing--usually because I wrote something poorly and an editor misinterpreted--but I reject relatively few suggestions. I figure that if I wrote something that confused my editor or they just didn't like it, a lot of readers will feel similarly.

Is "everyone does it" a good argument?. Clear to all? Not according to @bambax. Also, libel law? Why are you bringing up libel law. Manipulation of comments and fake reviews isn't libel.

> Manipulation of comments and fake reviews isn't libel.

To the extent the comment is atrributed to the author whose words were altered it can be.

An published, attributed comment is a published fact claim about what the author has expressed, and if it is false and damaging can be libel.

IIRC misattribution of quotes can be libelous in some jurisdictions if it causes harm to reputation.

The London Review of Books doesn't, and it has the best letters I've read.

LRB and other publications of that caliber receive enough submissions in their preferred style so as to only require light use of [sic] for errors. LRB letter writers are highly motivated to have their words be selected for publication.

The Economist wishes to publish from a wider set of contributors and its house style is harder for that group to imitate.

The town I grew up in had a local weekly newspaper that published unedited letters. It was fun — basically an analog message board.

One problem is that normal humans don’t write concisely. The other is that the Economist is a global publication... you probably would not be happy with long-form musings of Johnny Random from Papua New Guinea. You’re opting in for highbrow British style.