The Columnist Manifesto

At what point does editing become narcissism?

*[With apologies to the Divinyls]

I tell my students that revising your own writing is a key part of critical thinking, and it is. Yet at the same time, it can become so... self involved.

One aspect of my job as a law professor is to publish lengthy articles in law reviews. These professional journals of the legal academy are run by law students. Law students decide what to publish in the journals. When they choose your article for publication, they subject it to an extensive editing process, going through three or so drafts in as many months.

We, we professors wish for the brilliant student editors who will improve the piece, but it is just as likely to get an intrusive edit by someone who thinks he’s really smart but doesn’t really know what he’s talking about. In such cases, you (the author) can spend a heck of a lot of time, not editing, but un-editing – rejecting or undoing editorial changes that create substantive errors or make the prose worse.

Given that tendency, the best you typically get as an author is an editing job that focuses on technical citation forms in the footnotes, and otherwise leaves well enough alone. And yet part of you always hopes for that brilliant editor.

The first two drafts of my current article were of the “leave well enough alone” variety, and I was quite happy. And then, suddenly...

It was the so-called “managing edit” – supposedly just technical changes – but there was something different. Something wonderful.

Every few pages there was an editorial suggestion that made the article... well, better. Sometimes it would be excess verbiage cut out. Elsewhere a subtle but apt word change, or a phrase added that clarified a point I had left too vague. There were not loads of these, but a fair number: maybe 20-25 in an 80-page article. And the thing is, they were shrewd. Sometimes I’d think, “not a word choice I would have made, but you know what, it works!” Sometimes, more excitingly, “this editor really gets what I’m trying to say – even better than I did when I wrote this!” I didn't agree with each and every editing change, but most of them worked well.

Here, finally, was an intelligent, sympathetic reader, someone you rarely find even among your professor colleagues; a person who not only understands, but can explain what you mean. This editor was clearly an exceptional law student, someone who could probably do well at any law school in the country; someone who could go on to a brilliant legal career, perhaps one in academia. This law student editor had gotten inside my head. And I have to admit, it was kind of sexy.

I picked up my photocopy of my previous draft, the one in which I’d made some handwritten edits of my own, in order to double check that the student editors had correctly typed in my previous handwritten changes. And I found something curious. Looking at my first change – deleting an awkward phrase, and replacing it with something that expressed my meaning better -- I saw that in fact they had not typed in my last round of handwritten changes. Instead, they had handwritten my changes onto another copy, added some technical editing of their own, and returned it to me. You see where this is going... all the brilliant, sexy editing was my own, simply copied over by hand by one of the law student editors.

I don't want anybody else
When I think about you
I edit myself