Re:“How Americans edit sex out of my writing”
by coldtea on Friday October 07, 2022 @12:36PM
(#33123632)
>I don't really care about your argument here. Mine is very simple. If you write a crap sentence a good editor will flag that sentence for being crap. Maybe the editor cared about ideology. Maybe they did not. But if they didn't flag that sentence they would be a bad editor
Yeah, that's how editing works. Both I and the author know this.
On top of that, however, an editor can have other causes in mind for flagging a sentence (either explicit or unconscious motivation), besides it "being crap". And if they do this frequently enough, one can discern a pattern.
To put it another way, a cigar is something people smoke. But sometimes (to reverse the know quote) a cigar is not just a cigar.
Similarly, an edit it's not always an edit - sometimes it's imposing an ideology behind the editing.
>It's not a convincing piece of evidence
Part of the essay is about how for some of those cases there's no evidence, but you can see it if you come from the right (constrasting to the editor) background. And where it's more obvious, there's still "plausible deniability". It's about about the emerging pattern of editing decisions.
And like many things in life, you either see it or not. It's not a court case, or a math proof, it's more like a joke. You can't prove it is funny to someone, you can just find it funny or not.
Yeah, that's how editing works. Both I and the author know this.
On top of that, however, an editor can have other causes in mind for flagging a sentence (either explicit or unconscious motivation), besides it "being crap". And if they do this frequently enough, one can discern a pattern.
To put it another way, a cigar is something people smoke. But sometimes (to reverse the know quote) a cigar is not just a cigar.
Similarly, an edit it's not always an edit - sometimes it's imposing an ideology behind the editing.
>It's not a convincing piece of evidence
Part of the essay is about how for some of those cases there's no evidence, but you can see it if you come from the right (constrasting to the editor) background. And where it's more obvious, there's still "plausible deniability". It's about about the emerging pattern of editing decisions.
And like many things in life, you either see it or not. It's not a court case, or a math proof, it's more like a joke. You can't prove it is funny to someone, you can just find it funny or not.