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August 9, 2005

a few notes on editing and revision

Two confessions:

A - I'm a compulsive tinkerer. Nothing ever feels right or finished to me, especially after it's supoosed to have been right or finished. Of course, like most things, my tinkering runs hot then gets a little cold. (Picture candle-wax being shaped and sculpted.)

B - I have a kind of editorial color-blindness, by which I mean I don't fully "see" my own writing unless it's been made external to me via some form of actual and public publishing. I can make all the print-outs in the world, hit preview till my fingers bleed and I will still miss all kinds of writing and thinking problems. Until a reader actually exists who is truly external to me I have a hard time imagining him or her, making me a fairly lousy self-editor and potentially a worse marketer. Get me on the newstand or on the public server, though, and I am about three times smarter than I was before the circuit closed.

(In so much as I can explain these behaviors, I think it has to do with the fact that shame is likely the strongest interactive force in my personal grand unification theory, meaning that unless I am at risk of some kind of public exposure I'm kind of lazy. But that's for another post.)

The above confessions are obviously a song sung in praise of editors, and I thank the Holy Virgin for them every waking moment of my miserable writerly life. Unfortuantely (and you know where this is going), ebogjonson.com has no editor except for me and (by extension) those of you kind enough to write in and tell me exactly what the fuck it is I'm doing wrong.

This is a problem.

One way that I've been dealing with this problem is to spend a few minutes every day changing already existing posts. Besides presenting a practical problem for the reader (sorry, that thing I asked you to read last week? That was the wrong thing. You should have read this thing.) this practice makes me feel a little ethically queasy. While I have zero issues with making my language stronger from here until kingdom come, I do feel honor bound to cop to factual errors as well as changes that have been motivated by the observations/ripostes of readers and colleagues.

I've looked around at blogs I like, but haven't found a solution or convention that satisfies me. Since I'm fairly new at this I know I'm probably missing an obvious and already extant motherlode of guidelines on this question and I eagerly await the world's instruction.

In the interim, though, I thought I'd cobble together the following temporary/evolving set of guidelines to govern my editing and revising behavior and make them public:

ebogjonson's temporary/evolving guidelines

1 - Any time I update a post after publish I'll flag it in the title with the date of the update. I don't intend to adopt finer resolution on the flag than date because I don't envision being able to return to posts on a shorter cycle. (But I'll keep an eye on my habits and adjust the convention with a timestamp if needed.)

2 - Any factual error will be left in the posting but get a strike-through, followed by the correct information and an [EDITOR'S NOTE: XXXX] explaining the error if needed and crediting dude that brought it to my attention.

3 - Simple word changes, grammar fixes, point modulations, nuances added/deleted and WILL NOT produce any visible version tracking unless I've substantively changed the meaning of the posting.

My thinking on this is mostly mercenary. I believe that most people will likely get to these postings via long tail search and referral links, meaning one will probably encounter a post after I've stopped tinkering with it. Burdening everyone with version tracking most useful to a minority of early risers (and true fans :( !) strikes me as a kind of false piety so I'm not going to bother. However, if I add/delete whole paragraphs I'll flag them as added and change the title. Also, if some aspect of the piece evolves in response to the news cycle I will flag that at the bottom of the posting.

[UPDATED: The above is obviously a sloppy stop-gap and is likely to evolve both in practice and presentation.)

[UPDATED: Uh, all this is going in effect from 8.9.05 9:26 PM EST on, as I did some stuff I said I wouldn't do but I did it yesterday. Note that the current time - 9:26 PM EST - is about an hour and a half after the timestamp on the posting.]

4 - Exchanges with commentors will always go in the comments. I think it's kind of talking down to people to revise the source post in response to something written in the comments.

5 - This is just a thought, but I might flag the first versions of a posting with "RAW" or "DEVELOPING" in the title, meaning I am actually online and making updates. I may not do this at all, but if I do, you'll know it.

6 - I swear to tell the truth, the whole and whatever the third part of that saying is, so help me BLOG!

That's it for now.

Posted by ebogjonson in ebog housekeeping, on August 9, 2005 8:07 PM

Comments

Posted by: maha x at August 10, 2005 9:12 AM