The power of red ink

When I was an editor at The Reader's Digest, we still worked on paper with pencil or pen. Taking a long-winded piece down to perhaps a third of its original size required a lot of ink. Typically four or more editors worked on an article, each successive editor having more experience and, therefore, more authority marking right on top of the previous editor.

We could actually look at a page of this stuff and read it; it was a condensation hieroglyphics. Each editor had a favorite color -- mine was black -- and the junior editors knew better than to use a color preferred by someone at the top. I recall that Fulton Oursler Jr., the mad genius at the top for many years, preferred purple.

Today I edit on the computer, and the default color when changes are tracked in Microsoft Word, is red. I'd never thought about it much, but this can have unintended consequences.

Stan Carey, on his delightful Sentence first blog, chooses blue. "Blue is a more neutral colour, and once I adopted it there was never a question of reverting, though what colours appear on a client’s computer is beyond my control." He notes:

There’s more at play here than aesthetics and personal preference. A recent study published in the European Journal of Social Psychology suggests that red pens prime us to be more critical. “Because the color red is implicitly associated with avoidance and failure,” they note, “and red pens specifically have long been associated with errors, we propose that exposure to a red pen activates the concepts of errors, poor performance, and evaluative harshness.”

The researchers report:

• people using red pens to correct essays marked more errors and awarded lower grades than people using blue pens. . . . the very act of picking up a red pen can bias [teachers’] evaluations.
• exposure to a red pen in the context of grading a paper can influence behavior, likely without the awareness of the person being influenced

Seems rather intuitive, if you remember grade school and the teacher's red markings. Think I'll switch to blue.