Editing: a quiet revolution

I told my brother about this blog today. He responded:
I debated about which of my email favourite folders to keep the link in and decided against 'Rovers', 'Roleplaying', 'Buying', 'Jobs' or 'Other' and in the end felt that it could only really fit into 'Art'.
Which I'll take as an endorsement. Of course, if he became a follower (hint, dear reader) then he wouldn't need to bookmark it at all. Blogging As Art will be the subject of a future post (I bet you'll be lying awake waiting for that one) but today my thoughts run less to writing and more to editing.

If there's one editorial error that makes me suck in my breath through gritted teeth (and, let's face it, there isn't one; there are thousands), it's this:-

Aha, you were waiting for some text then, weren't you? But it really was this:-

Or, more frequently, this :-

It's the dog's bollocks. Which these days means something positive but (apparently) typesetters coined the phrase to describe such a wanton misuse of punctuation. I have no idea if this story is true but, oh, I do hope so - what a fine description it is. Although the family-friendly description, half a smiley, is almost as evocative.

People seem to be afraid of the poor wide-eyed colon, teaming it up with hyphens or (equally horrifyingly) replacing it with the lewd winking semi-colon, as if to draw attention to its ugliness, its innate wrongness.

Am I a petty pedant? Of course. Does it really matter? Of course. Am I shouting into a void? Of course. My organisation has decided that publishing services are dispensible in a forward-thinking, streamlined (cash-strapped) non-departmental public body. After all, anyone can proofread. All you need is a dictionary and Track Changes enabled in Word. Who cares whether you use a semi-colon to introduce a bullet list? It's just punctuation, right? Surely forward-thinking, streamlined (cash-strapped) NDPBs have better things to do than ensure their communications are clear, consistent, forward-thinking and, er, streamlined... right?

It's always seemed to me that a sign of good editing is its invisibility. 99% of errors may have been picked up, and nobody notices, but that tiny overlooked typo is the one that makes the reader question the authority of the text. Perhaps it's due to the proliferation of blogs like this one - even I don't proofread my own copy very thoroughly, and have to edit my posts later for those embarrassing misspellings (mispellings? mis-spellings?) that I've left behind. But, to an extent, that's fine - this is an informal medium and some level of flexibility is acceptable. But in a health and safety manual, that additional zero might cause a death. In an exam paper, that ambiguous question might rob a student of their profession. That grammatical error in a direct mail leaflet might stop a potential customer from parting with their cash. The editor smooths the way for the reader, quietly removes the thorns that might prick them. It's silent work, and us editors are self-effacing types on the whole, and that's our downfall. Without us, perhaps the text works. But does it live? Does it dream? Does it fly?


Editing. It's the dog's bollocks.