Motivations, Highlights & Challenges – part 3

Motivations, Highlights & Challenges – part 3

by Digby Hartridge

What have I discovered about editing and publishing, house styles and book production? I had some grounding. Part of my brief in one of my first jobs was editing the journal of a German explorer, in translation but involving some German text and complicated footnoting and referencing, and I’ve edited a couple of minor professional magazines. But things have changed. One changed thing was me: having graduated from longhand to word processing I’ve lost the ability to spell, part-corrected by Microsoft, which then proceeded to quite creatively mis-predict half of my intentions. I learned to change my settings and shut down most of their innovations but of course they regularly find ways of tricking me into unsuitable default positions. Fortunately, the book was finished before Microsoft 11, inferior in all respects to 10, was imposed upon me. I struggle to avoid burdening the Cloud, for undisputable moral reasons.
I digress: I was chastened by how many errors I make. Confident readers don’t read each word and they tend to see what they want to see. One has to read once for the sense, again for the details, again for the shape of the argument.
I hadn’t realised quite how important it is to get the input of an outsider, fresh to the text. Moreover, even though the editor was from a similar background and shared many of my preoccupations and held not dissimilar views, it is surprising how many gaps in the other’s knowledge we found, sometimes finding ourselves at cross-purposes. And how we took different implications from a word. Arguments over a preposition. Was it generational? She’s younger than I am. Geographical? She was born on the other side of the Limpopo. Or was it a similarity, perfectionism, that made for the odd squabble.
Then the result over the long term of digital printing: we’ve avoided many of the worst consequences but we’ve lost good subeditors in newspapers as journos ditch style guides. And in books I’ve become aware of infelicities of layout that would have been anathema to old school printers: a colon on the last line of a page heralding a passage of inset text on the next; “widows and orphans”; stranded half-dashes alone at the beginning of a line; widely-spaced dots for ellipses that make no distinction between a few words lost and a long passage spanning two sentences. I could go on. I started taking notice of the gross simplification and attendant imprecision of modern English: the loss of grammatical distinctions, of whole tenses (is it coincidence that this go side by side with the dulling overuse of the present tense in historical accounts?) – and punctuation again (random commas, the semi-colon forgotten; the colon under threat). I know the reasons: one, much-needed clear English campaigns decaying into an “anything goes” attitude; two, the immediate visual impression taking precedence over everything else; three, the welcoming of regional dialects to settle a score with the old received standard English; four, the inevitable decline of several global languages. More words and more associations with each word and fewer ways of expressing them elegantly. Fewer words held in common.

Part 1
Part 2