{"id":1889,"date":"2004-03-19T11:34:45","date_gmt":"2004-03-19T16:34:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kith.org\/journals\/vardibidian\/2004\/03\/19\/1889.html"},"modified":"2018-03-12T16:45:24","modified_gmt":"2018-03-12T21:45:24","slug":"essay-edit-exit","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/2004\/03\/19\/essay-edit-exit\/","title":{"rendered":"essay, edit, exit"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Your Humble Blogger thinks of blognotes as essays of sorts, that is, according to the American Heritage Dictionary, as short literary compositions on a single subject, usually presenting my personal view. So when I saw The Best American Essays 2003<\/a> on the library shelf, I thought I should pick it up.\n

It started paying off in the Introduction, by guest editor Anne Fadiman<\/a>, who edits The American Scholar<\/a>. She digresses from the description of choosing the essays that follow to tell of the time she was in the middle of editing an essay when the author died. She still wanted to publish the essay, and didn’t want to make a hash of it, so she asked his longtime editor at The New Yorker<\/I><\/a> to take a look at it, “hoping he might be able to guess which of my minor changes the writer would have been likely to accept and which he would have disliked.” He sent it back with a handful of additional edits, of course. The edits were great—flipping a sentence around so that the awkward (but correct) grammar disappears, fixing a mildly mixed metaphor, changing a verb to make the sentence flow better. Ms. Fadiman showed the edits to her staff, saying, “This was like having a front-row seat at the Editing Olympics.”\n

A week later, of course, the New Yorker<\/I> man sends another copy with a dozen more edits, to make the thing just that much better. I’m sure the posthumous article that eventually went out was spiffy.\n

Musing on this story, Ms. Fadiman realizes that this edition of the Best American Essays<\/I>, will, like the others, be dominated by the New Yorker<\/I> and, to a lesser extent, Harper’s<\/I><\/a>, because not only do they get (and pay for) good writers but they get (and pay for) good editors, and give those editors time and support. The American Scholar<\/I> simply doesn’t have the resources to do as good a job on that end, and she is forced to recognize it. Grumpily, or perhaps grudgingly, she suggests calling the series Best-Edited American Essays<\/I>.\n

Well, and that’s one of the many problems with blogs; we don’t get editors. I spend an hour, or if I’m lucky two hours, and hope to get a chance to reread the thing and catch the blatant errors before hitting send. In an age when the act of editing is already under suspicion, where intermediation is suspect, the internet comes along and—Whammo—blogs. My stuff could be better, I should say my stuff would certainly be better if it were edited. So would all the other bloggers’ stuff. But that’s not the blogosphere. In the meantime, give a nice thought to the editors of the world (Gentle Readers, some of them) who do that suspect job of making things better than they were.\n

Redintegro Iraq,
-Vardibidian.\n<\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Your Humble Blogger thinks of blognotes as essays of sorts, that is, according to the American Heritage Dictionary, as short literary compositions on a single subject, usually presenting my personal view. So when I saw The Best American Essays 2003…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[201],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1889","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-navel-gazing"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1889","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1889"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1889\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":16959,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1889\/revisions\/16959"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1889"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1889"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1889"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}