Good editing requires continual practice

A former colleague asked me to do a little editing on a college student's project, and I readily agreed to do a favor. Other than editing my own writing and occasionally pulling out a pen to mark mistakes in the newspaper, I have done very little editing in the past five years.

Like all learned responses, editing skills get rusty after a spell of inactivity. Sitting before a computer monitor and looking for misspellings, subject-verb disagreements, verb tense errors and so forth is something you have to do continually to be good at it. Early in my newspaper career, I was not a very good editor. As a college student, I liked to quote Ernest Hemingway, who once defended his errors by saying, "Anybody can hire an editor." I was a writer, not an editor. But my career demanded that I become an editor, and so I did, with the help of some good grammar seminars and my striving to explain to reporters why my corrections were based on good grammar and syntax.

Editing is a thankless job. If you get it right, no one notices. If you miss one word — or even one letter — used in error, everyone thinks you must be an idiot. I've had the embarrassing experience of seeing errors once an article was in print, but I had missed that very error when I saw it on the computer screen — before it was too late. When I look back at old posts in this blog, I find simple errors I had overlooked before.

Newspaper readers frequently complain that no one proofreads any more, and that's true in the strict sense of the word. In the old days, when everything in the newspaper was typed into lead type on a Linotype machine, proofreaders would sit and compare the reporter's typewritten copy to the "proof" sheet from the Linotype. Typographical errors would be corrected.

With the advent of "cold type" — computer-generated copy on paper or in digital form — proofreaders were eliminated, as were Linotype operators. All of the burden of getting a story right fell on editors. And editors are as fallible as anyone. That's why I insisted on having what we called a "second read." After one editor finished editing story, he or she would hand it off to another editor for a second look in an effort to catch any oversights. It was not a fail-safe system, but it was better than relying on just two eyes.

Good editing takes practice. You learn to stop and look at certain words, such as "lay" or "its" because their misuse is very common. You also look at antecedents and plural nouns. When you're doing this kind of work every day, it becomes second nature. I am no longer doing this every day, so I have yet another excuse for any mistakes I make.

Intensely interested but lacking access

When I was working as a newspaper editor, I used to tell people that editors and reporters don't necessarily know more about politics and policy than the average, attentive citizen, but our jobs just kept us more focused on current events.

Almost two years out of the news business, I'm still intensely interested in the political process and governmental policy. For followers of politics and policy, this is an intriguing time on both the state and national levels. But I have to admit that my knowledge of the ins and outs of politics is not what it used to be. I still devour all the national and state political/governmental news in the News & Observer every morning (and deeply regret the diminution of news coverage caused by the fall-off in newspaper advertising), and I read some online blogs, columns and news that keep me informed about the state and national political scenes. I am intensely interested in whether President Obama will be able to replicate his 2008 strategy, whether N.C. Republicans will succeed in tearing down the programs and policies put in place by state Democrats over the past century, and whether the Congress will ever find the political will to address the budget deficit and debt crisis.

I'm no longer being paid to think about these issues, write about them and assign reporters to cover them, and I miss that intimate involvement with the forces that shape out daily lives. People spend most of their days doing what they are paid to do, and I am no longer paid to pay attention to politics and politicians. I find myself in the position of so many of the people I used to talk to in my former career — intensely interested observers of the political sphere.

But there is another difference between the way I used to view politics and how I view it now. As a newspaper editor, I had access to the candidates, strategists, foot soldiers and advisers in the political game. It was not unusual for a candidate for governor or senator to drop by my office and talk policy. What the candidates wanted was favorable news coverage or, perhaps, and editorial endorsement. What I got in return was some insight into the candidates and the strategies in an election. I also got to form an opinion about the personality and intellect of the candidate. Very few intensely interested observers got this insight, and now I understand just how privileged I was to have that access. Since leaving the newspaper business, I have talked one state legislator, a congressman and a few county and municipal officials (all of whom I knew personally from my earlier career) but no governors or candidates for high offices.

My interest in politics and policy may be undiminished, but my knowledge and understanding have declined because I no longer talk to the folks making the big decisions.