Job security for an editor

Jane Austen couldn't spell, had no grasp of punctuation and her writing betrayed an accent straight out of The Archers, according to an Oxford University academic.

Prof Kathryn Sutherland said analysis of Austen's handwritten letters and manuscripts reveal that her finished novels owed as much to the intervention of her editor as to the genius of the author. 

Page after page was written without paragraphs, including the sparkling dialogue for which Austen is known. The manuscript for Persuasion, the only one of her novels to survive in its unedited form, looks very different from the finished product.

"The reputation of no other English novelist rests so firmly on the issue of style, on the poise and emphasis of sentence and phrase, captured in precisely weighed punctuation. But in reading the manuscripts it quickly becomes clear that this delicate precision is missing.


"This suggests somebody else was heavily involved in the editing process between manuscript and printed book," Prof Sutherland said.

The editor in question is believed to have been William Gifford, a poet and critic who worked for Austen's second publisher, John Murray. 

"Gifford was a classical scholar known for being quite a pedant. He took Austen's English and turned it into something different - an almost Johnsonian, formal style," Prof Sutherland said.

"Austen broke many of the rules for writing 'good' English. Her words were jumbled together and there was a level of eccentricity in her spelling -- what we would call wrong.

"She has this reputation for clear and elegant English but her writing was actually more interesting than that. She was a more experimental writer than we give her credit for. Her exchanges between characters don't separate out one speaker from another, but that can heighten the drama of a scene.

"It was closer to the style of Virginia Woolf. She was very much ahead of her time."

Guess that means that I am ahead of my time.

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.