The Editorial Mind

I remember that when I was very young, my mother the lang/lit teacher and my father the historian used to show me their students' work. I was five years old when they started me on 'find the mistake' and 'correct the error' games. By the time I was eight, I had a full-blown case of grammar/punctuation/style/spelling/etymology Nazism. In retrospect, I was a terrible student to have in class.

The thing to note is that such an education tends to shape an attitude to one's peers and teachers that is rather problematic. People tend to shy away from lectures on how bad their language use is. Fortunately, as I grew older, I learnt to keep my instincts cloaked. I couldn't quite hide them completely, but I could act as if I wasn't twitching inside at every mistake I saw.

However, the editorial mind tends to self-edit a lot. It goes against my grain to write in a way that violates the rules and guidelines accumulated over more than three decades of hard-won linguistic skill attainment. You will find that there's plenty of stylistic consistency in my various blogs: Bookbinding (my book review site), Two Ravens (sadly, now complete and completed), Elemental (unfortunately, not frequently updated), and Dark-Adapted Eyes (a sequel to Two Ravens). I think that I am unable to write in any other way.

I still remember one incident from about two years ago. We had just submitted a large project for some award or other. My former English/Lit teacher took one look at it and said, "You wrote this, didn't you?" She noted that the style was distinctively mine, even though I pointed out that others had worked on it too. Eventually, I had to confess to the fact that 95% of it was my writing. The editorial mind had tripped me up again.

Looking at the corpus of my work in my previous job, I am pretty satisfied at what I have accomplished. To this day, brochures and publications, papers and other documents from the institution in which I used to work, all bear my marks. The style is distinctively and distinctly mine. Where it has been altered, amended and added to, the results are obvious. Although I do not assert a legal right (and have never asserted such) to be acknowledged as author, I am amused by the continued recycling of my original text.

It is something we do not encourage students to do, this 'cut-and-paste' thing. In fact, we would dock marks from a student caught presenting a paper (for example) with substantive unmodified 'cut-and-paste' sections, insufficiently cited and/or acknowledged. But, ah well, what can you do in this day and age? Is it too much to ask for some degree of originality, and (because true originality is very difficult to find) some effort towards using language in a loving, thoughtful and well-crafted way?

Perhaps it is indeed too much, in this age of men. I blame the hastiness of the world and the need to produce papers and other documents post-haste. Add to that the overwhelming use of word-processing software and its accompanying paradigm of reusing and recycling, and everything falls into place. The same place. My editorial mind sees these things, and is sad.