THE JOY OF EDITING
There must be something wrong with this title. Editing is drudgery—necessary—but ugh! How can there be any joy in it?
I love editing. It’s like taking a scuffed-up gold ring and polishing it to a smooth sheen.
I got to thinking about this a while back, when helping my then-ten-year-old with his homework. Math and science come easily to Ari, and he loves history. But now that he was in 6th grade, his teacher expected him to write short stories. He has struggled with this—with considerable struggling against doing it at all.
“What should I say?” he whined. I advised, “Write about what you know. Like baseball.” That caught his attention. He ended up writing a story about a kid who got hurt in practice, worked on it, then drove in the winning run in the championship game. A plot, some action, and a bit of dialog. No character development, but not bad for a first effort.
He turned it in, and a few days later his teacher returned it with comments. He’d made a few punctuation and spelling mistakes, and had included some facts that didn’t help move the story along.
I’m not sure she expected a second draft. But I did. “Time to edit, Ari,” I told him. He pushed back. “I already worked on this so hard. That’s enough. No more!”
I then explained to him my views about editing.
The goal of any writing project—a brief, a memo, even a letter—is to turn out a final product that does the best job of reaching the reader. A writer should get into the shoes of the reader, and review the piece as a reader would. You want the reader to sail through the piece, get into the flow of the sequence of ideas, arguments, plot, character—whatever you are trying to get across. You’d prefer that the reader didn’t get distracted from this flow—by a barking dog or a crying baby.
And you yourself should never be the source of any distraction. Little errors—like typos, misspellings, and punctuation errors—can snap the reader out of the flow. Unclear pronouns—using “he” after a sentence discussing two men—can disturb and confuse the reader. Maybe only slightly, but enough to annoy and distract—and demolish the train of thought you tried to create.
Back in the old days, before computers, editing was different. I’d write out my brief in longhand (some attorneys preferred talking into a “Dictaphone”). Then I’d give the draft to my secretary, who’d type it up and give it back to me. Then I would edit, marking up the typewritten draft, and give it back to her. She would fix it, then give it back to me. I’d probably do one more edit—but that was enough. “Enough” as in “This editing process is taking a lot of time—my time and her time—going back and forth, retyping, etc. We have other things to do. Enough!”
Today, with word processing, this chore has changed. No more back-and-forth with a legal secretary. I do all the editing myself.
And I do it constantly. Every morning, when I resume work on a brief I’ve been writing, I start from the beginning—reading everything I’ve already written, editing as I go along. When I’ve finished writing the brief, I edit again. Then I give it to my paralegal to format and file.
Under the old system, I might have edited two or three times. With computers, I edit at least 20 or 30 times—maybe more. Thus, the quality of my final product has increased significantly.
After my brief is filed, I’ll have a chance to read it again—while drafting a reply brief, or while preparing for oral argument. For me, few things are more distressing than spotting a defect in a brief already filed. It’s too late to fix it. All I can do is remind myself to be more thorough and careful next time.
Careful editing might seem a mere perfectionist’s obsession. But it’s more than that. Appellate Justices spend most of their working lives reading and writing. That is their livelihood, so they take it seriously. Typos and the like stop them in their tracks—breaking their absorption of the substance of your argument. Not good.
And, when a judge sees a stupid typo, she might begin to wonder about how careful you are on the substance of the brief—your factual assertions, your discussion of cases, and your basic arguments. If the brief is sloppy in form, maybe it’s sloppy in substance too. All are in question, just because you skimmed over the last task.
So take the time to edit well. And who knows? Like me, you might have fun doing it.