Jo-Ann Langtree | Book Editing Associates
A radical, true, and wholly repulsive idea occurred to me the other day. I was editing a book about how the Divine Feminine must supplant the authoritarian masculine – a common theme in the New Age books that are my specialty – when it struck me that I was being bored, not so much to tears as to death. Though she was articulate and grammatically okay, the author’s redundancies and, especially, word-for-word reiterations had stretched what could have been said in ten pages to 250. She was killing me with her words.
In a comments balloon alongside one such patch of copy, I explained just how this involuntary manslaughter was coming down.
To wit:
I feel passionate about eliminating unneeded words and verbatim repetitions because I see their weeding – unless they’re being used strictly for emphasis – as a lifesaving activity. For example, here your reader is spared the loss of three seconds of life that it would have taken to read these 14 words. Seeing lazy syntax and redundancies as life-extinguishers, I am vitally interested in their deletion. Capisce?
We’re told that with each cigarette smoked and cocktail knocked back, we subtract precious minutes from our lives. The analogy may not be immediately apparent, but when readers must devote seconds, minutes, or hours to stumbling through a wilderness of deadwood words and numbing repetitions, that time has been irretrievably snatched from them.
Of course, the miscreant author is innocently unaware of his or her sin. Like the boring, time-sink person you might cross the street to avoid, these writers have the best of intentions: they wish to inform, inspire, scintillate, and uplift. Tsunamis of unchecked exuberance may even include ponderous nineteenth-century sentences, marred not only by malapropisms and flash-redundancies (“Madame suddenly fainted”; “because of the fact that”; “the vast majority of surrounding circumstances”), but also by entire phrases, “signifying nothing” (Shakespeare, Macbeth). More galling, as central ideas resurface, they are usually presented in the same revelatory tones as when they last appeared, just pages ago. There may be a slightly different angle, but these amnesic encores are as static and stale as the lyrics to “Twelve Bottles of Beer on the Wall.” Again, it helps me to remember that the chronically redundant writer is as innocent of intentional wrongdoing as the enamored lover, envisioning the beloved’s face – it just comes up, again and again.
Some writers have simply fallen in love, not only with their book “baby” but with their own voice … which is where good friends and diplomatic editors come in. Without our empathic and honest input, uncritical writers will continue to kill us (softly) with their very long song.
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About the Author
Jo-Ann has been in the writing and editing business for 35 years, specializing in self-help, holistic health, metaphysical and spiritual topics. Throughout the ’90s, she served as Associate Editor of Body, Mind & Spirit, a national New Age magazine for which she edited all copy and wrote features and celebrity interviews (Caroline Myss, Ali MacGraw, Thomas Moore, Fritjof Capra, Deepak Chopra, Betty Eadie). Best received were her insights into the psycho-spiritual dynamics of homeopathy (how it works) and a series about bodily ecology, “The Shocking Truth About Your Colon — And What You Can Do About It,” which sparked close to 300 responses. Over the past several years, Jo-Ann has edited more than 50 books, most of which have been published.
