Deep blue pencil

Dear Geist,
What's the difference between an edit and a rewrite? I sent a long essay to a literary mag. They accepted it with enthusiasm and said editorial suggestions would appear soon. A week later the essay comes back and everything is changed—not just small stuff but the order of things, and hunks of my prose gone and someone else's added. Holy Hubris, Batman! Is this ethical, and is it common?
—G.P.M., Yorkton SK
Dear G.P.M.,
“Editing” covers many processes: accepting the work and negotiating the contact; working with the author on shape, length, focus, voice and other substantial matters; line/stylistic editing; copy editing; fact-checking; proofreading; and so on. Every editor has a style of working with an author, and different editors may work on the manuscript in different phases of editorial work, from big-picture to small-detail editing. That editing style may be a set of written notes for the author to use in revising; or it may be one or more conversations in which comments, questions and debates point the way to the author's next draft; or the editor may simply take the manuscript by the horns and rewrite (an approach famously preferred by the writer/editor Gordon Lish). Writers' participation in the process varies as well, from those wishing to be part of every detail, to those who hand the approved draft to the publisher for editing and production and barely check the results, to others in between.
We think the editor who serves as interlocutor, rather than rewriter, does a better service to writing and thinking in general. Here's the writer John McPhee on editors who revise rather than advise: “[They] are called editors, and are not editors but rewriters. . . An editor's goal is to help writers make the most of the patterns that are unique to them.” Meanwhile, in North America and English-speaking countries elsewhere, by custom the editorial process is a negotiation. There's no rule against an editor rewriting a text, and no rule against a writer objecting to any proposed revision. For more on this subject, see our posts Drilled, Meddling with poetry and Editorial pushback.
—The Editors

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Only suggest rewrites.

As an editor, I would never actually rewrite anything just because of structure or style—unless it was explicitly requested. (For example, an ESL manuscript where the author has asked that the language be corrected as necessary.)

I would made edits to grammar, and I would query the need for any rewrites—leaving them up to the author to make the actual revisions. (I might revise a single word, even if was not strictly necessary, if I thought it was particularly needed—but I would attach a query to that change.)

I don't think it should be in the purview of an editor to act like a ghost writer. (Unless that's agreed upon by everyone involved.) But, as stated in the article, everybody approaches these things differently.

Jason Bassford more than 5 years ago

Deep blue pencil

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Only suggest rewrites.

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