
You might as well be a great copy editor - dannas
https://blog.regehr.org/archives/1471
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Wistar
NYT's "Copy Edit This" quizzes are quite good.

[https://www.nytimes.com/search?query=%22copy%2Bedit%2Bthis%2...](https://www.nytimes.com/search?query=%22copy%2Bedit%2Bthis%22)

[https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/11/11/insider/copy-...](https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/11/11/insider/copy-
edit-this-quiz.html?searchResultPosition=18)

~~~
yellowapple
Those are fun. Just got through the first one with 17 total tries (most of
which were on the 8th question).

Some of them are dubious, though, IMO. For example:

> The total amount available to |disperse| will be $150 million annually.

I guess in a journalism context more people are talking about disbursing than
dispersing, but how am I supposed to know that? For all I know this sentence
comes from an article about wanting to "scatter" that money.

EDIT: another example from the second quiz:

> Republicans will not like many of these proposals, but they have been
> |fulsome| in their praise of Mr. Trump since his election. Speaker Paul D.
> Ryan, for instance, has repeatedly said that he expects Mr. Trump to work
> with Republicans on their agenda of rolling back the Affordable Care Act and
> making large-scale changes to the tax code and entitlements.

The explanation for why "fulsome" is wrong here was that "this word means not
just “full” or “abundant” but “offensively excessive.”". How am I supposed to
know "offensively excessive" wasn't the intended meaning here? I ended up
picking it simply because it came across as a bit too pretentious, but not
before I picked "instance" for the same reason ("for instance" instead of "for
example" bugs me a bit).

~~~
zodiac
> How am I supposed to know "offensively excessive" wasn't the intended
> meaning here?

I'm guessing if it were the intended meaning, "but" would be incorrect in
"Republicans will not like many of these proposals, but they have been fulsome
in their praise of Mr. Trump since his election"

~~~
yellowapple
I mean, if it's "offensively excessive" from the writer's point of view, then
I feel like it'd make sense even with the "but"; that's indeed how I took the
sentence to mean.

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chadly
Something I've known for a while (but have really come to terms with more
recently) is just how important writing skills are even for technical people
(even coders). It's hard to get anything done if you can't convince people why
they should listen to you.

Especially in this increasingly remote-connected world, writing skills are
key.

~~~
carlmr
>how important writing skills are even for technical people (even coders).

Especially coders. Writing clear programs is a lot like clear writing. A
function is like a paragraph of a text. It should meaningfully abstract one
concept of your higher level logic. It should be introduced by a clean input
from the previous "paragraph", and produce an output that is the input for the
next "paragraph".

If your higher level function becomes too large, you can create larger
structures like sections in writing.

Having this ability to mercilessly copy edit, paring down your functions to
their core concept and putting them into meaningful context is really useful
if you want others to understand your code.

~~~
tom_mellior
All this that you write about code is correct, but I think you are missing the
parent's point. Coders also need to be good at writing _non-code text for
humans_. There is documentation to be written, and bug reports, and proposals
for new features, etc. I have colleagues who are brilliant developers, and
when they propose something I'm sure their idea is technically sound, yet
often I don't understand what they are trying to say because their writing is
much poorer than their coding.

~~~
carlmr
I wouldn't say I'm missing the point. I agree that coders need to know how to
write text. My point was that for coders writing is not the thing you do on
the side, coding itself IS writing.

That's why I said that "even" should be "especially".

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fennecfoxen
I would like to add a third recommendation to the list of two, and recommend
"Style: Towards Clarity and Grace". (Alternatively, use any similar book by
Joseph M. Williams featuring the words Style, Clarity, and Grace in the
title).

This book discusses the information architecture of clear and coherent
phrases, sentences and paragraphs in the English language, and a few passes
through its contents will leave you able to reason about the way you lay out
ideas and information in your writing.

~~~
Tomte
There is a fantastic section that shows why the passive has its uses, and that
"avoid passive voice" can be harmful.

~~~
fennecfoxen
Oh, yes. The passive voice is not simply dismissed in this work as a tool to
avoid responsibility. Rather, it takes its place as an important tool that can
make paragraphs more coherent, by structuring the sentences to elevate the
parts that really matter. The subjects of sentences in this paragraph, for
instance, are all strongly related to writing concepts. This paragraph itself
would be weakened if I were to begin, "Joseph M Williams promotes the passive
voice." Our communication would only be hindered if we were to highlight the
incidental matter of his authorship.

~~~
tom_mellior
That's not a strong argument. The natural "translation" of your first sentence
would be something like: "This work does not simply dismiss the passive voice
as a tool to avoid responsibility."

The author's name doesn't come into it, and there is no reason to transform
"does not dismiss" into the much stronger "promotes".

~~~
fennecfoxen
Well _excuse me_

I am sure the author polished his work over several years. I devoted mere
minutes to chatting it up on Hacker News. There's a reason you pay the author
for the book and you don't pay me.

Let's see you argue something better instead of just taking potshots at people
who bother to try, jerk.

------
awillen
Back in high school I was the copy editor for the paper (and the minutiae of
AP style are still seared into my brain), and it's definitely been a useful
skill. My first job was doing developer marketing, and we had a lot of devs
that were happy to contribute to our blog but didn't feel their writing was
great - a lot of it was just little grammatical and style stuff, so my being
able to clean it up really encouraged them to work with me on creating
content.

That said, I think that reading a book on copy edit just to be able to edit
your own stuff is a little bit of overkill. You don't need a deep,
sophisticated knowledge of grammar - something like Strunk and White's
Elements of Style will cover the grammar stuff you need while also helping to
offer a little bit better sense of bigger-picture writing style.

~~~
CapitalistCartr
Strunk and White's Elements of Style is trash; don't buy it, don't read it,
don't follow its advice. Read this first:

[http://www.lel.ed.ac.uk/~gpullum/LandOfTheFree.html](http://www.lel.ed.ac.uk/~gpullum/LandOfTheFree.html)

~~~
dhosek
My wife has been reading _Charlotte 's Web_ to our kids. I asked her if she
was familiar with the Strunk and White Guide and she thought I was asking if
she was familiar with the drunken white guy.

(For the record, she was familiar with neither.)

(And for those who don't know, _Charlotte 's Web_ was written by E. B. White
who is the White of Strunk and White.)

------
aaroninsf
Pro tip, from an actual pro: you can't copyedit your own copy.

Lots of reasons why, including, your inability to recognize problems you are
unaware of; the inexorable fact of reading what you think you wrote, not what
is on the page; inability to see logical problems, missing assumptions, etc.
Ad infinitum.

There are line-level hacks which can help with some of this, e.g. reading
backwards to find typographic and spelling error...

...but there is no general solution.

Suggested fix: find a professional peer and become their formal editing buddy.
Define terms and scope, this is not peer review–it is simply copy editing.

~~~
tmoertel
One copy-editing trick I employ is to use a text-to-speech system to read my
work back to me. If I merely read it myself, my brain will autocorrect my
mistakes into what I meant to write. When the computer reads my work, it pulls
no punches.

~~~
anonymousDan
Interesting. What software do you recommend? Do you know of something that can
take a latex or pdf document?

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cafard
You need to be the reader's advocate, to try to set aside your ego and read
your work as if someone else wrote it. This is not substantially different
from adjusting your code. One might argue that with code you have also a very
demanding reader, the computer, which might fail to run it or wreck something.
Still you are writing for a human audience.

~~~
msla
Computers demand formal precision, which is different from conceptual clarity.
Every obfuscator (including optimizers) relies on this fact.

Good code has both formal precision and conceptual clarity.

------
kqr
As the joke goes, "an author is someone who wasn't good enough at writing to
become an editor."

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mewest
I was lucky enough to have Prof. Regehr in my masters program. If he says
these are good books to look into to improve your editing, trust this guy, he
is as good as they get. _Now edit this comment for practice!_

------
WilTimSon
Knowing how to tighten the screws on a text is essential for a lot of
workplace communication, especially if you're trying to get something from
your higher-ups. Don't think everyone is going to take their time to become a
_great_ copy editor, but it pays to learn the craft at least a little.

------
staysaasy
My team went through a major shift a number of years ago, moving most complex
discussions to written documents (with commentary!) wherever possible. The
outcomes were great and fwiw we had a minimal remote culture pre-pandemic,
people would write things down even if they were sitting next to each other.
In particular:

\- It's much easier to track the provenance of complex decisions.

\- Deciding in docs reduces meeting bloat.

\- It's harder to get pissed at someone based upon a document.

\- Anecdotally, points of view seem to be better thought-out.

This article made me think of how we should remember to try as hard as
possible to adjust for variation in writing skill. I also wonder whether we're
inherently biasing against people who are _slower_ writers.

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ivan_ah
A very useful trick for copyediting and proofreading is to use a text-to-
speech tool. The default voice on Mac is quite good. I use it all the time to
proofread intros, and explanation sections in my books. For math-heavy or
code-blocks, it's not quite as good... but actually works OK for Python. See
[1] for how to setup a keyboard shortcut.

[1]
[https://docs.google.com/document/d/1mApa60zJA8rgEm6T6GF0yIem...](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1mApa60zJA8rgEm6T6GF0yIem8qpMmnaBFYOgV32gdMc/edit)

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anticristi
I'm speaking from the perspective of non-native academic English speakers. I
find that my time and the time of my PhD students is better spent focusing on
the high-level problems. Once those are fixed, we rely on professional copy-
editing. Done!

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jdnier
A favorite of mine is the book _BUGS in Writing_ , by Lyn Dupré (1998, Addison
Wesley). It's a teach-by-example book with lots of examples she rates as ugly,
bad, good, and even splendid.

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jeffmcmahan
Just wanted to add a book recommendation for copy editing: "Revising Prose" by
Lanham. It was recommended by a respected philosopher when I was in undergrad.
Excellent.

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mementomori
Modifying other people's code is kind of like a severe type of copyediting.

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50
Is copy editing a viable career?

~~~
joegahona
You have to be very good, because all the jobs are drying up.

