my editing essay

The last two days of school and finals week are upon me, so I decided to do a bit of a cop-out and post an essay that I wrote for my editing class. Many of you probably know that I dream of one day being an editor, and this essay is a little more about that. Since this essay is a bit longer than most of my blog posts, I included some music by the band High Highs for you to listen to while you read.

Becoming an editor. A really good editor.

             I decided that I wanted to be an editor when I was sixteen, and I’ve stuck with it. Sophomore year in high school may seem a little early to be deciding what I want to do with my life, especially since most people are still confused by sophomore year in college, but I’m the type of person who makes big decisions and sticks with them, and I decided I wanted to be an editor. A really good editor. I’ve shared my dream with a lot of people, and I almost find it a little odd that many people react in the same way: “Yeah, I can see that. I can see you as an editor.” As much as this is my dream, I don’t think I share the same image of “Danielle the editor” that others immediately get. Even though this is my dream, I feel like this image is so far away from me. But, there is one thing that I’m confident in, whether I have that fully formed image yet or not, I’m going to be great at editing, because I commit to things. Five years ago, I committed to being the greatest editor I can be, and I refuse to disappoint myself or anyone else who has ever had that vision of me, taking over the world of writing one Oxford comma at a time.

             I didn’t really know what an editor was when I decided that I wanted to be one. It seems silly now that I would have chosen a life I didn’t know anything about, but editing does fit me surprisingly well. What is an editor? is a question that I have been discovering the answer to as I have started taking editing classes, looked into editing internships, and begun doing editing projects of my own, but what makes a good editor? That’s what I’m trying to find out, and I suppose to be a great editor one must first figure out what great editing is. 

            I think that to edit you have to know how to write. You have to know how incredibly painful it is to write. When I’m sitting at my desk at 2 a.m. staring at a blank page—because my writers block never breaks until about 4 a.m.—I always think of a quote that I once read from Kurt Vonnegut: “When I write I feel like an armless, legless man, with a crayon in his mouth.” This quote never fails to remind me that I’m not the only one who suffers when it comes to writing. Writing is really hard, and I think that’s important to remember when you’re editing someone else’s work. What I am about to attack with my editing marks, the author worked really hard on, but that doesn’t mean it’s perfect.  Letting other people edit my own work, work that I put so much into, is even harder, but I also acknowledge that it’s almost impossible for me to edit my own writing. After all, why would I want to tear apart something that I worked so hard on in the first place? But, it’s for the best. It always is.

            I wrote my first real essay in the fourth grade; it was about panda bears. I wrote my first good essay sophomore year, it was about Ernest Hemingway’s “Hills Like White Elephants” (apparently it was a life changing year when it comes to me and the written word). Since then, I have dedicated myself to trying to figure out writing: updating a weekly blog, writing for one of Brigham Young University’s student journals, and writing essays that I keep hidden on my computer’s hard-drive. It’s taken some time for me to figure writing out, and of course I’m still figuring it out, but learning how to write is something that I have worked hard on, so that I can be an editor. A really good editor.

            The next step in becoming a good editor is knowing the basics, those fundamental principles of grammar that start in grade school where you discover nouns, and verbs, and adverbs, and develop in later years into prepositions, and pronouns, and modifiers. Brigham Young University’s editing minor starts with the basics: breaking words down, breaking sentences down, breaking skills down that you thought you had already mastered in grammar. There are three to four grammar classes that I had to take before taking the class Basic Editing Skills. This has made it clear to me that to be a good editor, you have to know your grammar, and you have to know it well. It was a little daunting reading from The Copy Editor’s Handbook “In many ways, being a copyeditor is like sitting for an English exam that never ends: At every moment, your knowledge of spelling, grammar, punctuation, usage, syntax, and diction is being tested” (Einsohn 4). I finally feel validated in all the hours that I spent diagramming sentences for Ms. Walker’s sixth grade English class, so that maybe those hours can one day help me pass this “test” of the editing world.

When going through my editing classes, I really struggled in my Modern American Usage class, and for a summer I thought this meant that I wasn’t going to get to be an editor. For awhile, I thought my dreams were dashed—that the sixteen year old me had made a bad decision—and I started looking into other majors and minors and other professions, but I didn’t want any of them. I just wanted to be an editor. I looked back at what I had failed to learn in that class; and I learned it, because if those were the skills that I needed to be an editor, and if that was the knowledge that I needed to have, I was going to master it. I still slip up on my grammar. Please don’t get nervous as soon as you hear I am an editing minor, and assume that I will catch your every mistake. It actually doesn’t matter to me that you used the wrong version of your/you’re in that text, because I make mistakes all the time too, but I’m learning how not to so that I can be a good editor. A really good editor.

Once you learn what the rules are, it’s time to learn how to break them. Beautiful writing does not pass every rule in the grammar book. A lot of the time, what makes writing beautiful is that it dares to reject the rules and create its own. As an editor, you can’t take this away from the writer. As M. Lincoln Schuster explained, “Don’t worry too much about the mistakes you make deliberately, that is, disappointments and failure that may come from taking a calculated risk. Editing and publishing are risk-taking professions—sometimes they are wild gambles” (Gross 25). I hope that as an editor I get some chances to take risks and to let things that don’t work technically work lyrically. Perhaps sometimes this will fail, but sometimes it will be brilliant. And being a good editor means letting writing be brilliant, even if it breaks the rules.

To me, editing someone else’s writing is a lot like putting on make-up in the morning. It’s not what makes you pretty, but it sure can make you prettier: When you edit, you aren’t going to be what makes something great, but you sure can make it greater. I know I’m going to be a good editor because I want it. I want to be the person that makes writing greater. Williams said, “Editors themselves will remain subject to the ‘joy, fulfillment, grief, and frustration’ of their craft, hoping that their ultimately invisible labor will make a real and positive difference” (Gross 9). This is what I can see ahead of me. Editing will bring me great joy and great misery, but this is what I want. I want to be an editor and I want to be everything that comes along with that title.

If I think about it, I can see what others see when they get a vision of me as an editor, and I’m not going to let that vision get away from me. I’m willing to work for it, and I’m willing to do what it takes to get there. There is still so much about the world of editing that is mysterious to me. I don’t have any personal friends who are editors, and I don’t have family members who have told me all about it, so I feel like I’m forging my own path, but that’s also what makes it exciting to me. I did a lot of dumb things when I was sixteen—like we all did—but I did one thing right. I decided I wanted to be an editor, and I’ve been working towards that ever since. I won’t stop now. I am going to be an editor. A really good editor.

peace. love. and dream jobs.

Works Cited

Einsohn, Amy. The Copyeditor’s Handbook. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011. Print.

Gross, Gerald, ed. Editors on Editing: What Writers Need to Know About What Editors Do. New York: Grove Press, 1993. Print.