More than just the right word

I've been doing some proofreading recently of documents by authors who are "subject matter experts", but who aren't all that good about transmitting their knowledge. For some, English isn't their first language; others have been so intensely educated that they can't stand to use a short word to describe something when there is a seven-syllable alternative that does almost as well.

Sometimes proofreading is sort of mechanical: a matter of pulling twenty or thirty commas out of a paragraph like burrs off your trouser leg after a walk in the meadow. At other times one could use the Bletchley Circle to help decode what the writer could possibly be trying to say.

There are perfectly respectable phrases in common use in English in India, like "do the needful", that have to be re-rendered into something like "do what is necessary" or "follow the normal procedure" for a global audience. Working with texts like that makes me ponder how often I write and say things that are only truly intelligible to that subset of the English-speaking world who are me.

Sometimes you run into an error in the text so painful that, if the intended reader met it, he or she would just quit reading. I love tracking down those errors and correcting them—preserving at the same time the author's credibility and the reader's sanity. I remember a Kansas romance I edited some years ago: the manuscript as I got it was about 70,000 words long, and I sent back a memo of suggestions and questions that topped 20,000 words. Although the author declined many of my suggestions, as was her right and duty, she picked up many others and made a much better book than it would otherwise have been. The correction that sticks in my mind has to do with a day on the farm when some cattle are being encouraged to go from one place to another, and the author had them going down the "cattle shoot". I was tempted to leave it, but in the end pointed out that "cattle chute" was not only correct, but would distract the reader less from the romantic glances the main characters were throwing at each other during the scene.

Someone asked me why, in the end, I like editing and proofreading. It's because I am happiest when the words and the grammar line up with the meaning of the text, and am all itchy when they don't. I hate it when people—even people I disagree with—undercut their own arguments by bungling their word choice or their sentence structure. I like a document to flow so well, delivering the author's argument in the author's unique “voice” so smoothly, that the reader never, ever thinks, “Well, that was well constructed.”

Presenting a document speckled with typos, misplaced modifiers, and suchlike is like showing up for a first date in a grubby shirt and with broccoli between your teeth.

And I hate it every time I do that.