Why Editing Is Like Brass Shining
The art of editing is like brass shining. It takes a dull, lifeless surface, marked with blemishes, and rubs it all up bright and clear.
When I was a boy I loved to sit at the kitchen table with a bottle of Brasso and various golden household objects in front of me. A couple of heart-shaped ashtrays, a domed tin that contained old keys and other mysterious bits and bobs, a pair of candlesticks, and a small hand-bell in the shape of a woman with a bustle skirt.
The Brasso made them cloudy. A cloth and some vigorous rubbing made them bright. It was such a satisfying transformation.
Making a cloudy thing bright is an apt summary of the editing process.
Recently, I have been editing a lot of work written by people for whom English is not their native language. It has helped to clarify the process in my mind.
Proofreading is the most basic element — the correction of typos and spelling errors. The only thing that distinguishes a good proofreader from a poor one is precision. The perfect proofreader will miss nothing. The average proofreader will miss a few mistakes.
The heavy work consists in copyediting. This is sentence-level manipulation, involving the re-sequencing of…
