A Love Letter to Editors
One of the most embarrassing things that can happen to an author is to find out that their printed book contains typos or errors. This happens much less frequently for me these days than it used to, which I attribute to one big change that I made in how I write: I listen to my editors.
When I was getting started with book writing, I used to sometimes feel attacked by criticism and corrections of my writing. I think this is a normal feeling, but it’s counterproductive. Today, I trust my editors’ changes and carefully consider every suggestion. My books still have typos — every book does — but the number and magnitude of the errors are smaller these days. But it’s not just their ability to catch typos that makes me love working with editors.
When I write about computer programming, I sometimes become bored with writing yet another paragraph about something that I consider to be obvious and unnecessary to explain. An experienced editor can spot places where I’ve become lazy, used more words than were necessary, or where I’ve made assumptions about the reader’s knowledge. The best editors I’ve worked with make every book they touch far better than it otherwise would have been.
I view anything written by AI with extreme suspicion, and I scrutinize editing suggestions from AI spelling and grammar tools closely. I don’t know whether AI will ever replace professional editors, but I know for a fact that some authors and publishers are already using AI instead of hiring editors. The results are often predictably bad. As I was writing this newsletter, in fact, I found an obviously AI-generated article about National Editors Day. Buried in far too much boring and factually incorrect text is the worst error you can make in a description of an annual event — it lists two different dates for the event. I don’t know whether National Editors Day even exists, but it certainly should.