It's All About Precision & Clarity

Editing, for me, has always been driven by a passion for precision and clarity. Certainly language can be wonderfully vague and evocative, but (putting deconstructionism and critical theory aside, where they probably belong) it is also our best hope for a broad means of communicating clearly and precisely, on topics where that sort of thing matters, to the broadest possible audience. For this reason I love the field of information design. Strunk and White, Steve Krug's Don't Make Me Think, Edward Tufte's Envisioning Information, really good signage, a great headline, effective ad copy, a nice brochure, a solid blog post, a great installation guide, an amazing magazine redesign, and even the small-business process checklists championed by Michael Gerber, all have a great deal in common. Their focus is precision, clarity, and effectiveness in communication: the transfer of information to bring about as predictable a result as possible. The goal is no different when I help an author refine a manuscript, and the same basic techniques apply.

At the moment, most of my freelance income is from book editing. But I have done a fair amount of copywriting, speechwriting, and periodical and package design, as well as some advertising, procedure manuals, information architecture, and the like. I hope to be doing more of each of these in the future. I could easily be wrong but, speaking in general terms, I suspect the core skill set is about the same for all of them. Certainly there are refinements that apply to each specialty, but in none of these endeavors will you be successful unless you can put yourself in the place of the reader and ask, "How can this product communicate as clearly and succintly as possible, on the first read, toward a desired result?" But that skill seems rare. At a minimum, it is rarely exercised well. It's unusual to possess it, it's difficult to hone it, and it's almost never easy to use it.

I am aware, of course, that language is a pure abstraction. In fact, to a limited extent, I would agree with the deconstructionists;  as a salaried editor I would frequently offer this maxim when we faced our daily challenges: "There is nothing more difficult than unambiguous human communication." How much more amazing, then, that it can become so effective?

On Editing

Walter Benjamin was a critic and philosopher who had some important insights into art and culture.

I can’t abide his Marxist worldview, but somewhere along the way he wrote a simple, brilliant sentence that so perfectly captures my experience as an editor that I now use it as a guide in thinking about almost every project:

“Work on good prose has three steps: a musical stage when it is composed, an architectonic one when it is built, and a textile one when it is woven.”

While I could make a case for components possibly being more accurate than steps or stages, this is nevertheless a masterful summation of what it takes to create truly good prose.

Music, of course, is the writer’s voice, tone, and style, combined with the passion and depth of insight he or she brings to the project.

The architectonic component is all about the superstructure of the work. How well is it planned and laid out? Do all the pieces, large and small, join together in ways that are clean and logical, each contributing in a fitting way to the whole? Does that architecture create a comfortable building the reader can move around in and walk through without ever feeling lost or confused?

The textile phase is what ultimately distinguishes solid, compelling writing from merely serviceable prose. Ideally, the individual elements of each sentence, paragraph, and section must be discerned. As necessary, they then must be separated from one another, cleaned, trimmed, and rewoven into a tighter, stronger, smoother, more pleasing fabric. Such a fabric will complement the architecture and embody the music.

Most draft manuscripts have been composed quite a bit better than they have been built, and built quite a bit better than they have been woven. The frequent task of the editor is to help the writer see that his understandably precious manuscript, which seemed to be a good 90 percent complete, is really about 70 percent complete, maybe less.

The next piece of bad news is that the 80/20 rule absolutely applies to writing. A great many books, especially those intended to help people grow spiritually, go to press prematurely. The ironic result is that the reader who may have picked up a particular book out of a sense of obligation now faces an added disincentive: the material is just not connecting as it could—as it should.

Almost nothing of any significant length goes to press at 100 percent; the effort required is just too great. But somewhere north of about 85 percent lies the sweet spot, the place where the music sings, the architecture is sound and logical, and the fabric is smooth and beautiful. When you combine that with content that can genuinely help people live their often conflicted lives in a world that is packed full of both soaring beauty and relentless sin, you have done a rare and wonderful service to God and man.

That's the goal.