By Ken Hutchins
Usually, when I refer to my editor I mean my friend, Lou Gardner. She is who I might call my designated editor… More about Lou later.
I am writing this without my editor. Hopefully, I will succeed without too many errors. Brenda Hutchins is a good editor and she will have to suffice. Not that Brenda is inferior to Lou for the purpose of editing this particular article, but she is more convenient at the moment. Brenda edits almost everything that I write (as well as does Lou), and she is strong on various editorial aspects that Lou cannot supply.
Brenda supplies historical context that I’m often desperate to include in some articles. She was continually present when many of the events transpired with the Nautilus-funded osteoporosis research and she can supply details that I either completely missed at the time or that I do not remember. Later, she heard or overheard conversations or observed behavior in the Nautilus front office when I only experienced faint glimpses of same while working on the other side of the Nautilus compound. And she provides a woman’s perspective to medical explanations that I’m struggling to explain.
[By the way, I cringe at referring to Brenda as “my wife” and I resent others referring to her as “your wife” or “Ken’s wife.” She has a name—an identity—separate from mine and she deserves something somewhat loftier than Ken’s something (Ken’s dog, Ken’s car, Ken’s house, etc.). However, I find it necessary to explain to others who might have need to know our relationship.]
Over the years, I have had many editors… some formally, many informally. Some have been legal assistants, attorneys, nurses, court reporters, or retired school teachers. I have been fortunate to have had the advice of several doctors spanning as many as six specialties. A few of my editors have been engineers. And two have been formally trained typographers.
Different Kinds of Editors
Editors have specific skills. Some are extremely focused on photographic editing. Others are strictly type editors. And some, like Drew Baye, are extremely proficient at both as well as being sharp as a content editor in our shared domains.
Restricted within the arena of what I call type editors, some can only read for typos and misspellings, while others can catch these as well as the grammaticals. And the really proficient ones of this genre are adept at sentence construction and word choice.
In my organizational head space, type editors are a subset of print editors. Another subset of print editors are graphics editors. These editors have a critical eye for appearance. They are very sensitive to the balance of photographic images as well as to typeface readability (eye travel, font selection and size, whitespace, etc.).
And then there are the content editors. I might categorize both Brenda and Lou as content editors depending on the content of what I am writing. When I get into arcane subject matter like friction theory, neither would be likely to weigh in while Michele Mingoia, being an engineer, might. When I’m writing on the exercise certification process, as we all had moments in developing, Lou, Michele, and Brenda might weigh in.
[Michele, as much as Arthur Jones or Ellington Darden or Philip Alexander or my father, played a critical role in many aspects of my career. She showed me how to break through some of my anxieties to start and to continue into business. She spent many hours helping me with the design of exercise equipment. She tutored me in calculus. She shot and edited videos. She MCed our seminars. She proofed contracts, books, photographs, instructional scripts, and newsletters. She advised me on employee management. She financed me. I could never thank her enough.]
I am presently editing for a former government official who I would never dare to advise regarding content. To be a content editor, one must have pertinent experience with the subject.
My Editing Start
I have served off-and-on as an editor. I began my serious writing career just before beginning to edit works for Ellington Darden. Actually, in the beginning, Ellington and I reciprocated on our projects. He agreed to edit (proof) my first writing project while I (a few weeks later) proofed his first book. I recall his then use of panniculus adiposis and my apprising him of panniculus carnosus. I suppose this earned me a chance to develop my writing skills further with his tutelage.
In those days (1970s-1980s) Ellington and I marveled at the precision of the large daily newspapers. Errors were not nonexistent, but they were surprisingly few when the sheer volume of the text was considered against the imposition of tight, short deadlines. How did they do it?
During this time, Ell incorporated my help proofing his books. Some of these assignments were to proof the manuscripts, then the so-called bluelines. The stage at which typesetting had then reached was a photographic imaging process. Ell would send in his manuscript to the publisher, and the publisher would send back galleys of bluelines. We had a deadline to return the galleys back to the publisher with marked corrections. Then a followup set of galleys was sent to Ellington with the corrections made.
Often, as Ellington warned, the corrections of the errors of the first pass would be made but by making more errors in the correction process. It was an unending battle to catch them all. Eventually—after two or three passes—the effort to catch all the mistakes was deemed at a point of diminishing reward and the publisher sent it to print.
Again, how did the newspapers manage to succeed with so few errors?
Later, I edited (only content) for Athletic Journal, a publication that Nautilus had purchased incognito.
Being a professional photographer, I am a fair graphics editor as well as a fair photographic and design editor, but I do not put myself in either category as being great. I am merely adequate for most work and I must defer when I deem the job to be over my proverbial head. At least I know enough to realize the point at which to seek help.
Primordial Editing
[Sorry for the subheading. I can’t think of a better word for the material to follow.]
Although what I term “my formal editing career” began with Ellington—and his stern tutelage was critical for me to advance beyond what my teachers and professors had convinced me was proficient—my writing and editing began just like you and most everyone else.
We all edit in various ways and to some degree. If you are reading this you have a critical eye for several aspects of my work. You might not compose material like I do, but you do catch some of my mistakes—mistakes of spelling, mistakes of grammar, mistakes of logic, etc. You do edit, at least in your mind.
We began to edit as we learned to understand words and to speak. And we refined this into literacy as we learned the alphabet and then learned to construct sentences and paragraphs.
There are many shades of literacy. As Bart D Ehrman explains in the following video, Was Jesus Literate?, only 10-15% percent of Roman citizenry were literate to the point of being able to read well, and the idea of mass literacy is a modern phenomenon. He quotes William Harris (Ancient Literacy) from Columbia University on this subject and
notes the key questions of what constitutes literacy. Is it qualified by a person’s ability to merely write his name? [Some hayseeds sign with a mere X.] Or is it sufficient to be able to read text but not be able to generate prose? [I suppose that much fewer than 15% of the people at this time were fully literate… being able to both read and write.]
And what about mathematics? Erhman (I cannot speak for Harris) mentions that the scribes of the time and tax collectors and tradesmen had little need of reading or writing as they only dealt in counting—as in measuring, weighing, and tallying. However, as Michele Mingoia taught me, mathematics (not the measuring and counting, per se) is a language. Therefore, should we include those who use applied math (as in chemistry or physics or engineering) or theoretical math, but who cannot compose prosaic sentences, as literates? What about those who read, write, and edit music or computer code? Does this indicate the possibility of a kind of literacy bias?
Arthur Jones sometimes berated an MD to his face, “You doctors are all illiterate.” Although Arthur’s comment was not accurate, it rang of a certain truth that I appreciated. (So did often the doctor.) One can be extremely literate in the language of medicine and not be good at prosaic composition.
My story of the Checkers attendant comes to mind:
What Language are You Speaking?
https://ken5.substack.com/p/what-language-are-you-speaking
And we must also acknowledge that interpreting a language—such as a spoken foreign language—is much less challenging than speaking that language. And speaking that language is much less challenging than reading that language (unless printed matter was first mastered as is often the case in a classroom versus on the street). And that writing prose in that language is much more challenging than reading in that language.
My Tribulations in School
Until I was a junior in high school, I considered English grammar and composition easy subjects, although I hated composition. However, I was then admitted to an accelerated class and therein confronted challenges that shook my confidence. One aspect of this struggle was my hearing.
One assignment was to interpret a contemporary music performance (In Held T’was in I by the Procol Harum). It involved vocals that I could not understand. And this experience was the beginning of a lifetime of frustration, not really with hearing, per se, but with phonics.
I almost never understand the lyrics of a song. I might enjoy a musical piece—even the singing—but I often need Brenda to tell me what the lyrics are saying. I have struggled with this for decades.
My most trying academic experience was taking instructions during chemistry lab from Asian teaching assistants. I could hear the instructor but I could not discern the phonics that formed the words. By the time I might figure out what words were represented by the phonics and discerned the message of a sentence, often the speaker would have moved on to the next several sentences and I would have completely missed hearing several statements.
To comprehend someone talking, I am perpetually playing catch-up.
And to shake my confidence more, I did poorly in college English. It was my worst grade of my first semester at Texas Tech University.
I finished my pre-requisites for English by taking an interpretive literature course. For some reason, I began to seriously click into what I read [Reading, as opposed to hearing, became the key to me understanding.] and reported my interpretations in compositional form. At the end of the semester, my professor pulled me aside and told me,
Ken, if you put your energy into this, you have the potential to be a great writer.
My private thought was:
Get away from me. I have finally satisfied my prerequisites for this domain and I will never venture into anything related to it again.
Two years later, I was in the United States Air Force and with a lot free time. I spent most of my days in the library, mostly reading novels by James Michener and reading Guyton’s Medical Physiology. [It was one of the few places that I could escape both the weather and the cigarettes.] Eventually, I became inspired to write the articles that I presented to Ellington. This marked the beginning of my journey beyond the expectations of the formal education process as it has to do with English composition.
Submission—An Important Prerequisite to Learning
Any good writer or editor will admit that submission is the greatest requirement to improve their skill. If one cannot submit to criticism—sometimes harsh and embarrassing criticism—then such ambition is hopeless, or at least forestalled.
When I first encountered Ellington about my writing project in 1975, my manuscript was really sharp—or at least by my then-current standards. And I respected Ell’s criticisms as he was a PhD and because he had already published articles in commercial magazines. I also wanted to please him, and I wanted to master the subjects in which he espoused a philosophy.
Thus, Ellington had a modicum of control over me and could utilize this control to coerce compliance with his writing standards and conventions. This also made me competent to scrutinize his materials for both content as well as for the other facets of type editing. Eventually, I would gain some ability to judge graphics design as well as to master photography. Thus, editing for him was a vehicle for my education regarding several domains.
Along with Ellington’s influence, I also studied the writing styles of Arthur Jones, Robert Ardrey, Eric Hoffer, Richard Mitchell, Mark Twain, and Strunk & White. I developed an eye for comparing scripts and advertisements and other productions against what I learned from Ellington—mostly—but also from these other writers.
Then, there was the experience with Ilanon Moon. This 80-year-old former high school Latin teacher was hired by Ellington to edit a book project. Ellington had taken over the project from a panicked publisher whose author had bailed on the publisher. The publisher was committed to outlets to provide the completed book within a tight deadline.
We all got involved. Ell asked Arthur Jones for permission to borrow me for a few weeks. As typist and proofer, Brenda pitched in in the evenings with the cooperation of her boss, Jim Flanagan.
Ilanon was an amazing woman. At an advanced age, she was extremely energetic and striking in appearance with a full head of snow-white hair. She was reputed to be able to quote the entire works of Julius Caesar in their origin Latin and was considered—because of her Latin facility—to be the foremost authority on European history during the time of Caesar.
She began cracking the whip on us at 05:50 every morning and worked us until 20:00 nearly every evening until the project was complete. What’s more, she often stayed up late in the evenings talking about world history and politics with Arthur Jones.
In the course of this project, I appreciated that Ellington submitted to Ilanon. She was his authority on writing and he hung on her every word as I did on his and that of Arthur Jones.
During the middle of each workday, I had my duties to fulfil for Nautilus. On one of these days—while Ilanon was working with Ellington in his office at the end of the Nautilus showroom—I was in the showroom with clients.
As I was showing the clients the prototype of a new pullover machine that had been ostensibly scaled down for the female frame, Ilanon overheard me refer to it as the Ladies’ Pullover. [We salesmen had vacillated for several weeks whether to name the product the Ladies’ Pullover or the Women’s Pullover.]
Ilanon shot out of Ellington’s office and inserted herself between me and my clients. While pointing her finger in my face, she lectured,
Young man, this machine is a Women’s Pullover, not a Ladies’ Pullover. To call it a Ladies’ Pullover you are assuming that all women are ladies and you cannot do that.
Ilanon shot back to Ellington as suddenly as she had appeared in my immediate midst.
We watched Ilanon take a few of Ellington’s sentences from 15-18 words down to 10-12 while making the statement stronger. She seemed on a mission to get rid of useless words! And she coached Ell on how to make his writing better, stronger, more appealing, more successful.
Ilanon was on a mission for elegance as much if not more than for eloquence. She was the Percy Julian of prose. [Julian streamlined the chemical process of making progesterone, making it practical and inexpensive.]
Ellington was submissive to Ilanon. Of course. Why else would Ellington have hired and flown her from Willis, Texas to Lake Helen, Florida for this project?
[From about 1950 to 1980, Willis was a small community seven miles north of Conroe, Texas where (Conroe) my family and the families of Ellington Darden and Philip Alexander lived. Ilanon was the organist in the Willis Methodist Church and taught Latin at Conroe High School where Ellington and Philip were her students. By the time I was in high school, Ilanon had retired.]
But of course, as the adage goes, “You can’t push with a rope.” You can’t drive someone to voluntarily excel who does not want to excel. You can only drive the involuntary (as I was for much of my stint as a college student) to a modicum of mediocrity. The truly aspiring acolyte must already be going and desirous of going in the particular direction that the mentor is encouraging.
[Let’s not ignore the value of exposure. Even the mediocrity of a formal education exposes students to the possibilities of the world about them. And this exposure potentiates the random ignition of aspirations for excellence within random individuals.]
Requesting an Editor
It should be obvious that when you as a writer request an editor, it’s sort of like requesting a friend beat you up. However, this is not often obvious, and it needs to be admitted by the writer.
The question is how beat up do you want to be?... How bad do you want your punishment to be? And how much do you want to improve your writing? The two are intertwined.
I currently edit for a very specialized authority. He runs a blog and writes an article for it almost daily. His information is the best in his field and he is greatly respected in his domain.
I do not like his writing style. More importantly, his production is rarely clean and he needs a full-time editor who is on-call to check his work BEFORE he publishes it. However, he will not allow anyone to insert themselves into the schedule, thus slowing his production. Therefore, I manage to apprise him of issues a day or two AFTER he publishes a piece, and he takes a while to fix any issues.
He would greatly benefit from someone like Lou Gardner; however, one of them would wind up dead unless Lou tailored her edits—like I have—to his most basic needs. In other words, she would have to alert him only to typos, grammaticals and misspellings. And in so limiting the scope of editing, he would never benefit from Lou’s talents beyond the basics.
It is natural that once someone develops proficiency in a skill, he becomes set in his ways… obstinate. He becomes resistant to change. We are all that way to some degree about various aspects of life. I admit that I am.
Ellington successfully shaped my skills and thought processes into his style. I then slowly modified this shaping to my own with the influence of the other noted writers. Eventually, I developed my personal style and this cemented how I view the world, how I approach explaining the world to myself, and how I articulate my domain in speech and the written word to others.
When I allow (even invite) another person to massage my writing style, I must lay my resistance aside and endeavor to persevere (a phrase from actor, Chief Dan George). After all, I have spent years developing my style and I really don’t want it messed with; however, it sometimes needs to be messed with for the benefit of improvement. The challenge is to balance my ego.
And the balance of ego is not a lone, one-sided affair. Breaking through the resistance put up by my ego requires the confidence and bravery of the editor to advance editorial advice. Whether the editor is Lou or Michele or Brenda or Sean McNicholas, someone must have the courage to pierce my ego’s natural defensiveness. And I must reciprocate this courage with the respect to pay heed to its messaging. For editing to succeed, there must exist a truce of egos.
Corporately Set Ways Brenda worked for a large insurance brokerage company for about ten years. As any large company must manage its outflow, the word processing department used the company template that was required for all communications. So too, a government department or agency has a template specific for its purposes, just as does the typical law firm, medical office, etc.
A template ensures that all company communications have the same appearance, formatting, etc. This is often the tool to enforce/ensure uniformity and to streamline production, although template adherence often violates conventions of grammar and layout. For example, witness the excessive use of all-caps in many government and corporate documents and the employment of wide columns that strain the eye.
After ten years of being ruled by the template, Brenda is still somewhat affected by it 20 years after leaving that company. It’s part of how she thinks and organizes her thoughts on paper, although its effect is becoming a progressively ancient intellectual remnant. Nevertheless, for better or worse, it’s still faintly resident in her psyche.
I’m currently publishing on Substack. Substack provides a template which is very easy to use. It lacks the facility that I sometimes would like in my work such as additional font choices, underscoring, and other minor options, but it is not overly constraining. I write in Microsoft Word before pasting it into Substack as Microsoft Word has much more robust editing and formatting features.
Appearance
As Richard Mitchell asserted, when you write something, you are effectively signaling to an audience, “Pay Attention, I have Something Important to Say.” [my paraphrasing]
And if you are going to do this important thing, you want to show it in its best light. You want it to be perfect—not just with respect to grammar and spelling and linguistics, but also in appearance.
And with “appearance,” I’m not specifically referring to ornateness or eye-popping photographs, although these graphics tools might come into play. I’m talking about the formatting, layout, font selection, eye travel, white space balance, organizational subheadings, etc. These are concerns that a good typographer knows well and that many otherwise-good writers may not know much about.
Recently, Lou Gardner hassled me about the appearance of the text flow of one of my PDF books. My automatic reaction was that her concern was not worth the time it would take to make the global change from acceptable to great.
At first, I thought, “Who cares? I do not have the patience to mess with this.” And my reaction illustrated a common reflex of almost any writer who is up against a tight deadline and who needs to move on to the next assignment. But I was NOT pressed for time. I just did not want to deal with another layer to my thought processes.
[I am ashamed to admit that my reaction was reminiscent of how I characterize many exercise instructors who resist my advice to control aspects of their job. I refer to them as the “good enough crowd.”]
But then Lou asked me, “Don’t you want your work to have the best possible presentation?” With this question, she had me.
We must remember that the success of getting a point across through the written word is enhanced by making it easier for the reader to perform the basic action of reading. It’s easy to lose sight of the importance of making the writing easy for the reader to read!
The More Editors the Better?
Not necessarily.
So how many editors does one need? Up to some point of diminishing return, you need as many as you can enlist. And sometimes, you can never have enough eyes to scour a piece.
Twenty-five years ago, I wrote and published a quarterly newsletter. For one issue, I had as many as seven pairs of eyes perusing it before sending it to my printer. When I first picked up one of the 2,000 printed copies (an expensive printing job), my eyes went directly to a glaring typo in the masthead. Yikes! How could we all have missed this?
Of course, you can indeed have too many editors. At some point, the delay and complexity of using more than a few is greatly encumbering.
I have experienced having over 30 editors for one project. Such a number of editors is very impractical unless there are special technical aspects which require a host of experts.
With some projects—particularly with academic research papers involving many co-authors—each author may have personal editors while the lead investigator has some editors overriding those personal editors. It can become very unwieldy but is often inescapable.
I find that two editors are best for my purposes now; however, I sometimes need to consult a doctor or some expert who has intimate knowledge of something I lack the confidence to expound upon.
[In the midst of my frantic deadlines to produce the quarterly newsletter, I avoided asking my long-time office manager, Ellen Morrel, to proof. Ellen was a former elementary school teacher who read painstakingly slow. Eventually, when I found myself with no other person to proof a work, I relented to use her. To my surprise and delight, she discovered inconsistencies in the text and asked very pertinent questions that led to more discussion and elaboration. She knew enough about my technical world to be a critical content editor.]
The Exceptional Lou Gardner
When someone describes another as exceptional, they usually do NOT exactly mean that that person is truly an exception to some rule or standard. They, instead, usually mean it in some flowery way. This is deserved about Lou, but it is not what I specifically intend to convey.
To this point in this article, I have tried to demonstrate a fluid connection between a person’s ability to write and one’s ability to edit writing. I believe that these abilities are—as already stated—tightly intertwined. But then there is Lou Gardner.
Lou has a degree in mathematics. And math was once her focus in life. But I do not hear her mention this much. [The same is true of one of my sisters, so this is not unusual to me.]
Lou is obsessed with editing. She edits just about everything she comes across. And much of the process is automatic with her. The impulse to correct the written word also includes advertisements and items she is merely reading for pleasure or for reference. She obtains great pleasure. And I understand this preoccupation as I have the same affliction to a much lesser degree.
However…
Lou believes that she cannot write… specifically, she says that she cannot compose a narrative, that she does not have creative ability. I have pried her about this several times and I can’t seem to determine exactly what it is that she believes she cannot do. Whatever her exact deficiency, it is indeed a unique aberration.
Another Related Aberration Lou has the uncanny ability to glance at a page of writing—prose, advertisement copy, movie script, etc.—and instantly see most, if not all, of the compositional, formatting, and layout problems. As far as I know, she has no formal training to do this. It’s just Lou.
[This talent reminds me of my sister Kathy’s scanning ability. When she was only three or four years old, she had the ability to glance at a large yard where Easter eggs were hidden and know exactly where all of them were before the other children could begin to hunt. Seems unfair, doesn’t it?]
And although Lou is able to read for content and sometimes edit for content, she rarely does, although she exhibits critically important concern for word choice and sentence construction. Her focus goes straight to the structural problems. If I ask her about her opinion regarding the content of something she has edited, she usually has to go back and read the material with a separately focused interest to glean its meaning.
As I have herein documented, I’ve had many editors. And they come with many varying and specific strengths. But I’ve never encountered anyone as uniquely, even strangely, gifted as Lou Gardner.
In 2018, a close attorney friend name John Daly told me about a jobs fair that his firm hosted. Therein, a student who was considering a career in law interviewed with John and asked him what to study to become an attorney. John explained that the foremost objective toward a legal career was to master writing.
“The lesson lies in learning and by teaching you will be taught.”
Lyrics from In Held T’was in I by the Procol Harem.
I went through a time when I was obsessed with ‘white space balance’ on the page. Webpages caused me to give that up, but I still think it’s an important part of content delivery on the printed page.