August 2003

Penciled In

Teaching Precision
By DOUG FISHER

I admit it. Sometimes I wear funny hats to class – a ball cap with a giant pencil screwed into it (yes, that’s a real working pencil and eraser), a hard hat (my favorite for “building” headlines), a cowboy hat (useful for “rounding up” loose sentences) and others. Sometimes I don a ghoul’s mask or that of a hockey goalie (think Jason).

You see, I teach editing, one of the more feared classes in the School of Journalism and Mass Communications.

It seems that people staring down a gerund and a comma, with a semicolon lurking in the background, a misbehaving prepositional phrase nearby and an eight-count headline waiting around the corner, don’t react all that well. I’ve been called the “great Satan” and, I suspect, worse. I’ve also had students run from my office gleefully screaming into their cell phones, “Mom, I got a B!”

It shouldn’t be that way, of course. Editing isn’t really about commas and semicolons and gerunds and subjunctives and taking the hyphen out of teenager and putting it in grown-up. It’s about pride in subtly improving stories in ways the writer and reader should never notice. It’s making sure someone stands sentinel for the readers’ understanding and sensibilities. It’s about being a kid again – finding that shiny crystal of good writing among all the rubble, polishing it and holding it up for the world to see.

And it’s about precision: making sure what the writer intended to say is what the reader gets; catching that misused word, that factual error or that off-key phrasing. Readers continually tell us those things damage our credibility as journalists. The highest praise a copy editor can get comes in two little words: “Good catch.”

But it’s hard to remember you’re there to drain the swamp when you’re surrounded by participles.

And so I hope the hats break the ice, make people laugh a little, realize that editing, while serious stuff, can be fun. I’ve had students become parts of sentences moved around the room by “editors.” We sometimes do headline word crossword puzzles for labs. There’s editing “Jeopardy.”

And then there are the Nerf balls. Did I mention those? No? Well, I guess you’ll have to come to class to find out.