AUDIENCE

Cast aside those impersonal descriptions. Drill down, get close. Who is sitting in the front row? Put some faces on ‘em. Then watch those faces (even as you perform). Are they yawning? Looking puzzled? Cheering for you? Nodding enough? Nodding off? Now, who’s sitting in the second row? They’re a different group from the front-rowers. Do your best to please both of these two foremost rows, and ignore anyone else in the auditorium – except when they startle you by applauding and throwing money. When that happens, redirect the program accordingly.

It’s wise to assume a specific audience. But you can never assume you have assumed the ideal audience. The more innovative your work is, the more methodical you’ll have to be at enabling that ideal audience to find you and lend some backing.

BOILERPLATE

Get rid of it. Examples: "Investors remain uncertain about the direction of the stock market" (New York Times, every other day). "Clearly" is a stupid word to use unless you are in the window-washing business. "A number of" is a phrase used by writers who are too lazy to count -- if you can’t be specific, say few, several, many, or a mega-multitude. Write plainly, as opposed to dumbly or blandly. Also see Workouts.

COMMAS – http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/05/21/the-most-comma-mistakes/

DEPTH – see Shallowness. No time for Depth here. I designed this document so you’d be off to a fast start.

ENTERPRISE, AN – what your book project should become:

http://www.ExactingEditor.com/BookLearning.html

FIRST DRAFTS

When using a word-processor, it’s just fine to make the first draft as scattered and splattered as possible, because the point is to get started: Create something to re-do or add to. (A friend of mine once marveled at how computers enabled him to produce "a draft of an outline" and still feel productive.) But, if you are using a typewriter, take a long walk and "process the words" in your head before filling up those first couple of pages.

Typewriter? Millions of people used to write that way, and it boosted their mental organizing powers. How so? Because a typewritten first draft has to be better than "scattered and splattered." Word-processing made revisions easy, which is why we have so many of ‘em. And you’re sure this is a good thing?

FOCUS

(a) The name of a valuable, and brilliantly edited, 1996 book by marketing strategist Al Ries.
(b) The most intangible "deliverable" an editor can deliver to his clients and collaborators.
(c) What the Ford Motor Co. built to replace the Escort.
(d) The result of using a magnifying glass. Perhaps you could give one of those big ones to your work group’s proofer?

GREGARIOUS

One characterization you are not likely to apply to an editor. But sometimes we like puns or practical jokes.

HAPPINESS is attained when the writer you are working with is unhappy enough to take charge of his or her manuscript without firing you. You might – indeed should -- be a skilled MD (manuscript doctor). Just remember that, in the end, it’s their literary health and their "body" of work.

IDIOSYNCRACY can save any piece of writing from looking like the product of a committee embedded in the Fortune 500. The trick is to make the idiosyncracy either (1) a device for imprinting a couple of vital ideas, or (2) a marketing gimmick. Once it serves its purpose, in a given book or publication, let it go.

JUDGERS make the best editors, while PERCEIVERS are better off in the research department or managing the library. Judgers are high on clarity and closure, whereas Perceivers are figuring out how to triple the manuscript’s tally of footnotes.

KIPLING (Rudyard) is the Britisher who defined the doctrine that best allows a writer to be his or her own editor. See Questions.

LAG-TIME allows editing to work. Without at least a week of decompression and distancing, it’s very hard to edit anything you wrote yourself. Editing a client’s composition can be done right away, of course – but you still ought to wait a few days before sending the rewrite back to him or her.

MISTAKES are an editor’s lifelong nemesis. They are also what keeps us in clover (isn’t that an old cliché? Well, it’s not a new one). Granted, the behavior can be taken to extremes. I like to correct typos on street signs and business displays. But just try walking up to the responsible party with a red pen.

While preparing this document, I found a misspelled word on the cover of a book produced by Penguin Books, a serious publisher. The Art of Possibility, a New Age fluff mound by two ever-so-smug Cloud Niners, has a blurb miscasting the text as "pratical." Yet, if that goof prevents a fellow editor from purchasing an embarrassing book, it can be redeemed – the book-cover typo, I mean, not the book itself.

NON-FICTION is what this document’s advisories refer to. I know next to nothing about writing or editing fiction (and I’m delighted not to have to compose any of it on a typewriter. All that witty dialogue, all that tweaking and sneaking).

ORGANIZATION is a literary art and an editorial staple, and the methods to deliver it don’t need to be complicated. Consider all the basics being driven home by this web document, mostly by using the alphabet. Just remember to tell the audience – early -- what the organizing principle is. In his 1989 book Information Anxiety, Richard Saul Wurman said five ways are always available for organizing information: By category, by time, by location, by alphabet, or by continuum.

www.uri.edu/library/staff_pages/kinnie/lib120/info_org_prnt.html

Home-schooling columnist Kate Tsubata called it a "soup-to nuts resource for all English communication skills" (Washington Times 2/21/2005 page B4). An aspiring editor could use the whole bloody site as a self-development manual. But, as an auditory, I found it more fun to go through three decades of trial by error. Read the bloody sentence out loud: Do it sound right? AHA

QUESTIONS

Yes, they make the reader think -- but don’t let the writer you are working with ask too many questions in a paragraph or on a page. If you do, the audience will consign that person to one of two troubled categories: Either a lawyer, or someone who has amnesia. Lawyers are trained to ask finely tuned, often manipulative questions. Writers and editors are more likely to find satisfaction in the lines of Kipling’s 1902 fable The Elephant Child:

I keep six honest serving-men:
  (They taught me all I knew)
Their names are What and Where and When
  And How and Why and Who.

No doubt you’ve heard that somewhere. But don’t leave out what comes next:

I send them over land and sea,
  I send them east and west;
But after they have worked for me,
  I give them all a rest.

REPRESENTATION is what the editor offers, working with the writer, on behalf of the audience. Unless it’s a web forum, the audience can’t tell the writer what’s what, who for, or where now. These missions fall to, and sometimes on, the editor. The trick is for the editor to "be him/herself" while taking pains to represent the audience – who, let it be noted, is not paying him or her.

SHALLOWNESS is the effective editor’s invisible consultant. It’s also the factor/actor/exactor the writer-client should not hear about directly. Took me 25 years to learn the very high value of Shallowness. It obviously isn’t worth a doctorate, but here’s my sincerely glib tribute to Shallowness:

Depth is for divers. Most readers don’t dive, they wade.

Depth is for diggers. Most readers don’t dig, they scoop.

Depth is for Jungians – I love to read Carl Jung, but when’s the last time you heard one of his partisans win an argument?

Depth is for the Feelers – whereas the Sensors are eager to find out: What’s your point? And how can I use it?

In most editing situations, work to satisfy the waders, scoopers, pointers and users early on. Worried that this will alienate your "serious" readership? Most of those deeper types will race through the shallow sections -- in search of your seriousness.

Are there exceptions in the non-fiction world to the above rules? In other words, places where Shallowness is the enemy, right from the start? Yes. But it takes time to explain them. We don’t have that here. Call The Exacting Editor at (703) 849-8068.

TYPEWRITERS are the only tool left for writers and editors to dodge spyware, prevent data zaps, keep their brains nimble while in the drafting phase, and experience a clunky keyboard. If you are 35 or under, saunter into a sole-proprietor office repair shop and acquire an IBM Selectric Two for $150. Then drop me an analog memo about how it salvaged your attention span.

As noted earlier, the skill of being able to "process" most of the points in our head, on the way to a coherent first draft, has been ravaged by word-processors. Sure, I relied on one to perfect this A-to-Z treatment, but that isn’t the point. I drive to Baltimore, but I also find reasons for a daily walk. Organizing sentences without gazing into a computer screen promotes mental dexterity; and you can be for typewriters without being "against" word-processors.

UNDERLINING is something they should do in real books. Why? Well, why do we underline? To emphasize. You think italics do a better job of that function? Really? I disagree. Italics should be saved for movie and book titles; names of newspapers; magazines and federal reports; sentences that are either gags or "quotes" that were never actually spoken; and foreign words imported into your text to look au courant.

VERACITY is my higher-level spin on ACCURACY, normally the non-fiction editor’s north star. I had to use the A slot for something else, but Veracity covers that value and also personalizes it.

http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=veracity

WORKOUTS (since I can’t say "exercises")

(a) Go through respectable newspapers and see how much fluff you can red-ink. Surprise: The best-edited daily in America is…USA Today.

(b) For a year, don’t send e-mails to anyone unless they work in your office or unless you’re scheduling something and the message is quick and tactical. Use the freed-up time to write one old-fashioned letter per week.

Had to get version 1.3 done and posted. Check back in six months and this list of exercises will have grown.

X-CLAMATION MARKS

Using them too often makes you, or your writer-client, look like a female teen. How much is too much? If it’s a non-fiction piece, too much is more than one exclamation mark every 2,500 words.