Writing tools I learned from The Economist

Re:Writing tools I learned from The Economist by Veen on Monday April 05, 2021 @04:02PM (#26703888)

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.)

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Re:Writing tools I learned from The Economist by dylan604 on Monday April 05, 2021 @04:49PM (#26704518)

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.

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Re:Writing tools I learned from The Economist by dredmorbius on Monday April 05, 2021 @09:59PM (#26707163)

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)

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Re:Writing tools I learned from The Economist by ghaff on Monday April 05, 2021 @06:11PM (#26705312)

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.

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