Quote:
Originally Posted by BearMountainBooks
Most writers don't have sloppiness due to lack of training or due to lack of trying. We have sloppiness or errors due to reading it too many times. Due to focusing in on our own pet peeves. I know what I meant to write and THAT is what I see--it just might not actually be the words that showed up on the computer screen. And yes. I can misread that same paragraph 12 or 13 times. My editor reads it once. And apparently it glares...
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<grin> The same thing happens to programmers writing computer code. It fails to compile and build. It had been just fine, then the programmer made changes to add a feature. The programmer reads the code again and again, unable to see where the problem is...until a colleague glances at it, says, "Oh, yeah. You left out a statement terminator
there, and everything following made no sense to the compiler because of that!" A single missing character in thousands of lines of code...
But yes, that's what editors do. In some cases it may be structural, like "You can drop the whole first chapter, because you are using it for setup you are actually repeating later in the book." Or "You need to decide what story you're telling. There are two different ones in this book, and you can't tell both at once."
In other cases, it may be prose. Some years back, Virginia Heinlein spearheaded a reissue of her late husband's work, using the original manuscripts before editing as the base. In some cases, it made a difference, like _Podkayne of Mars_, where the original story had Poddy dying at the end, but was changed at the editor's insistence because it was being written for a Juvenile/YA line. (Heinlein felt that undercut the point he was making, but complied.) In other cases, the editing was be more subtle. A word here, a line there...all intended to tighten the prose and add to the drive of the story. The edited versions were arguably better because of it.
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Dennis