writing on Medium

You Can Un-Edit!

The secret weapon most editors don’t know about

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Editors are not gods. I’m an editor myself, so I know what I’m talking about in this regard. I’m just about the most un-godlike person in existence. And as an editor of both Questionality and Musicality, I sometimes make mistakes. Sometimes I miss things that should have been changed, like punctuation that’s misused and which I should have caught and fixed. Or bad grammar that any former English teacher (which I am) should have corrected.

There’s also the opposite issue. Sometimes I ‘fix’ things that shouldn’t be fixed. Or need not be, at least.

Let me give you an example of what I’m talking about from a story I recently had accepted at another Medium publication, rather than this one.

I had been talking about how my late wife and I had disagreed on entertainment. Movie genres in particular. Here’s a direct quote of what I said on that subject in the piece as I submitted it. “She liked ‘nice.’ I liked challenge.”

The editor who reviewed my story before publication made several minor changes in it, most of which I can live with. But there was one I couldn’t.

The editor inserted the word ‘the’ in front of ‘challenge.’ Now it read: “She liked ‘nice.’ I liked the challenge.”

But that’s not what I meant. I meant it the way I wrote it.

Yes, I know, ‘challenge’ is usually a verb. It can go through tense and even ‘number’ changes like most verbs. (Challenged, challenging, challenges, etc.) But it can also legally be a noun. And it doesn’t have to have an article like ‘a’ or ‘the’ in front of it to be a noun. It can stand exactly the way I originally wrote it.

The catch in this case being that putting the article there altered my meaning. I was using ‘challenge’ as the opposite of ‘nice.’ I was saying, “I liked things that challenged me, rather than things that were comfortable.” But I’m plenty wordy enough as it is, so I said it in shorter form. In other words, I was using the word in a general and very wide sense. ‘Challenge’ as a concept, not as a specific instance.

I also wanted to echo the terseness of what I had said about my wife’s attitude.

The editor missed the point. They also evidently weren’t aware of the finer details of the definition. By inserting the extra word, they totally changed the intended meaning of the paragraph.

So what did I do? Very simple. I ‘un-edited’ it. I put it back the way I had submitted it. It was easy enough to do. Just click on the little ‘dots’ icon, select ‘edit story,’ fix the problem, and re-save. Done. So there! I doubt the editor will even notice the change.

Medium does not inform the editor when the author makes changes after publication.

But for the sake of argument, let’s say they did notice what I had done. What then?

Well, they have three choices: 1. They can edit it again and reimpose their version. (Leading to a game that could go on for a very long time.) 2. They can un-publish and decline the story. 3. The can do what they should have done to begin with — send me a PM before publication, asking why I had said it the way I had said it, and then deciding how to handle the situation, rather than just making the change arbitrarily.

Have I ever done what they did, rather than what they should have done? You bet. I do it all the time. Editing is a time-consuming thing, and anything any editor can do to save time is worthwhile. (To a point.) I’ve made changes without consulting the author first. Sometimes I add a reply to the article or poem after publication, pointing out that they have the right to put it back the way they wanted it. Sometimes I don’t. But the fact of the matter is that any author on Medium can re-edit a piece after publication, with no limits. [This isn’t true of ‘real’ publications, of course. Like the Atlantic Monthly, for example. Try it with them and you’ll get kicked so high you’ll go into orbit.]

Here’s another example. One of our poets here on Questionality routinely leaves much of her poetry unpunctuated, or nearly so. I assume this is done on purpose, to add to the ‘dream-like’ quality of much of her poetry. Many other poets have done the same thing. Take e.e. cummings, for example. Not only did he sometimes insist on not capitalizing his name, he also very often used incorrect punctuation, incorrect ‘layout,’ and even incorrect grammar. Did he not know any better? Don’t be silly. Of course he knew. He simply wanted to create a certain effect and knew how to do so.

Take William Faulkner. The third section of his long story The Bear has no punctuation, no capitalization, no nothing! It’s a single thousands-of-words long, almost-unreadable sentence fragment. (Thank God he at least put spaces between the words!) It’s not poetry, but it has a semi-poetic effect. The ‘narrator’ of the section is illiterate but wise. The way it is written out in printed form helps get the point across. If a normal editor had fixed it all, the point would have been destroyed.

So my philosophy about editing poetry or poetic prose is: ‘Don’t.’ There’s too much danger of destroying the author’s intent.

But not every editor in the world shares that philosophy. ‘Our’ poet, who shall remain nameless, though anybody who reads Q regularly can easily figure it out, recently submitted one of her poems to another publication, because she didn’t think it would ‘fit’ at Questionality. It was in her normal mostly-unpunctuated style. Without checking with her, the editor at that other publication ‘fixed it,’ thereby ruining it.

Solution. Time consuming, but simple. The poet went into the published poem and un-edited it. The editor never noticed. The poem now stands pretty much as it was submitted originally. ‘Yay’ for the poet. ‘Boo’ for the editor.

“So,” you say. “If everything an editor does can be undone, what’s the point of editing at all? What’s the point of having any editors?”

There are two answers. One is implied by the way Medium handles publication in general. You can self-publish anything. Bypass the editing process. Do it your way, even if it’s horrible. They won’t stop you.

The second answer is: If you submit something and an editor makes changes, it’s sometimes possible to learn something from the changes that they make. If you make an inadvertent or misinformed mistake, and the editor fixes it, and you notice the change, it’s possible that that next time you’ll be more likely to do it ‘right.’

Take one very nit-picky example: the serial comma, or ‘Oxford comma,’ as it is more popularly known. If believe in it, absolutely. It’s the way I was taught, and I see the logic behind it, and I impose it in cases where the author failed to use it. I don’t send a PM. I just change it. Hopefully, if the author doesn’t understand why I made the change, they’ll go read my article on the subject. [LINK.] I do mention my attitude on the subject in the writer’s guidelines to this publication, but not everybody reads the guidelines before submitting. (I can’t force them to, and wouldn’t do so even if I could.)

You’ve already encountered my philosophy about editing poetry, above. Here’s my philosophy about editing prose:

If it’s formal in approach and language, I’m going to try to enforce the normal accepted rules of grammar, usage, and punctuation. Since there are two such accepted rule-guides, I choose Chicago over Strunk & White, because that’s the way I learned it. If you use Strunk & White, and are consistent about it, I won’t change it, except for the ‘comma’ thing. (The popular AP guide is an attempt to be a compromise between the two ‘biggies.’ That’s what most ‘grammar checkers’ use. Fine, I can live with that.)

The less formal and more relaxed your piece is, the less likely I am to intervene. Except for egregious misspellings and grammar errors, I’ll probably leave it be. I don’t ban sentence fragments if properly capitalized and punctuated. I do ban run-ons but I don’t ban comma splices, especially if they are in dialogue or in ‘chatty’ passages.

And I miss a lot. I get in a hurry and read too fast. Later, after publication, I do often re-read, and in doing so I often see stuff I missed the first time ‘round. If it’s bad enough, I’ll go in and fix it. If it’s tolerable, I probably won’t bother.

But the bottom line is: In my opinion the author is in charge. It’s your story, your poem, your essay. If you want it to be impossible to read, that’s your privilege. (And your problem.) If I make changes in your work, in editing it, that you don’t like, it’s your right to put it back the way you did it originally. If I hate the overall effect, it’s my right as editor to un-publish it and ‘send it back.’ You can then do whatever you want with it. Self-publish. Submit it somewhere else less picky. Trash it. Whatever.

Or you can PM me and we can discuss it like rational supposedly adult human beings. Which is what we should have done in the first place.