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You might as well be a great copy editor

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Re: You might as well be a great copy editor

#21

Post by yesenadam »

fennecfoxen wrote: post #4

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…

> "Style: Towards Clarity and Grace"

As I was typing in "Style: Towards Clarity and Grace" I was thinking Huh? Wouldn't "Toward" be much better?! And indeed that's what it is. Made me feel good about my copy-editing potential.

Re: You might as well be a great copy editor

#22

Post by carlmr »

tom_mellior wrote: post #16
carlmr wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 f…

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 tr…

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".

Re: You might as well be a great copy editor

#23

Post by eequah9L »

aaroninsf wrote: post #15

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 spe…

> 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.

Re: You might as well be a great copy editor

#24

Post by staysaasy »

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.

Re: You might as well be a great copy editor

#26

Post by vonnik »

aaroninsf wrote: post #15

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 spe…

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.

Re: You might as well be a great copy editor

#28

Post by yellowapple »

Wistar wrote: post #14

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

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).

Re: You might as well be a great copy editor

#29

Post by closeparen »

chadly wrote: post #3

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.

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.
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