I must begin this discussion with a disclaimer so I won’t wake up tomorrow to see that “BMS” is the trending topic on Instablog and Twitter for excessive self-promotion.
No, forget about the disclaimer. Let me begin with a scenario.
Have you ever handed a manuscript to someone to be edited, and when the edited copy came in, you realised that it was different from what you intended to communicate? And I don’t mean just the correctness of the words, syntax, or punctuation; these are the hard things. I am talking about the softer things that are easier to miss—voice, tone, humour, style, flow, emotions, and connections.
Perhaps when you wrote the manuscript initially, you intended to express outrage at an injustice meted at someone, but when you read the edited copy, it feels just as forceful as something your cat wrote. Perhaps it started as a business document targeted at investors, but what you read finally was miles away from anything investors would even consider mildly inspiring.
Perhaps you infused a well-thought-out, humorous line and spent the weekend thinking you probably should be the next Jim Carrey because, you know, the wit, the style, the flow. But when your edited copy comes in, at best, it reads like Broda Shaggi’s slapsticks, and at the very worst, it reads like something from the 9 pm Network News.
That is the language I am talking about. You want to ensure that even when your punctuations change, even when your words are replaced with something more fitting to the discussion, even when the syntax is edited for better comprehension, what is left retains your flow, your style, your tone, and the soft touch of your communication.
I would have said, “That’s me. I’m that editor,” but I guess you already figured that out.
