Magazine
Is editing a lost art?
Kenyan author Yusuf Dawood, centre, is shown a children’s book at a book fair in Nairobi by Solo Were of East African Educational Publishers, right. East Africa lacks enough trained editors. Photo/ANTHONY KAMAU.
Posted Saturday, September 6 2008 at 15:39
The other stage is line or stylistic editing. This is the editing that gives the manuscript a certain linguistic thrust and poetic touch, making words “to jump off the page” in exquisite beauty. It is at this stage that the editor sometimes behaves like a creative writer.
Line editors have been described by Audrey Owen as people “in love with words, who delight in the perfect phrase, and have large vocabularies. They have a good sense of rhythm so they can choose whether to make your words flow like a lazy river or pound like a hammer, depending on your message.
They read widely for the pure joy of it. They understand the creative use of punctuation. They love dictionaries and thesauri (And they even know that thesauri is the plural of thesaurus)… Every word, every punctuation mark, gets close attention… This is the artistic part of editing.”
Unfortunately, most editors in East Africa do not read anything else apart from the manuscripts they edit and so cannot find the perfect phrase or vocabulary to give the author’s words an editor’s touch — the golden glean that makes words and sentences to shine with an alluring literary sheen.
If the editor, who trades in words, is poor at them — then the consequence is a book with blunt sentences sure to send the reader snoring if not “gasping for breath” as the aforementioned reviewer lamented.
The lack of meticulous developmental and line editing has contributed to the publication of mediocre books. They may even have good content but poor editing makes them dead and incensed reviewers dig their graves and bury them in a litany of mournful and often angry reviews.
IN HIS BOOK, EDITORS ON editing, Gerald Gross writes, “I wouldn’t go so far as to say that developmental and line editing are lost arts, but they seem to be arts less practised than before. And that perhaps is why critics and reviewers, more and more often, make a point of remarking on the absence of editing, or inferior editing, in a book they are reviewing.”
It is high time the quality of the editorial process was enhanced and everyone would profit from it, from writers to editors and publishers.
The writer is the publishing manager of Macmillan Kenya Publishers. johnmwazemba@yahoo.co.uk
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