The etiquette of editing your letters

I Nthis job, like in most others I guess, you win some, you lose some. Recently I received an email which read: “Please accept my thanks for proof reading, correcting and publishing my recent contribution, despite my typo errors. I only noticed them too late to correct them myself.”

Nice. However, another reader was less happy with my work: “The meaning of my letter was somewhat diluted,” he wrote, “by the inclusion of a bracketed paragraph ... which I did not write and which has no bearing on the sense of what I was trying to say.”

This puzzled me somewhat. On checking, I found that the bracketed section was in fact my insertion of the headline and date of the article referred to in the letter; it was intended to provide context for readers. It is frequently done. In the old days, people would go and look up their back issues to read up on the story, but I don’t suppose that happens so much nowadays.

These exchanges got me thinking that perhaps I should explain some of what goes on when editing your contributions. It’s your forum; it’s all your work, but not every letter can be published word for word (though most are). I do try to keep changes to an absolute minimum – and they are nearly always made with the aim of improving clarity and readability.

The first and most obvious edit is to correct literals; perhaps I don’t catch them all, but I do try.

Next , edits for length. It’s just a fact of life that letters have to be made to fill an allocated slot on a printed page. We have space for around 2,400 words a day; it would be dull indeed if we filled that space with three letters of 800 words. Of course, brevity is the soul of wit, but I am mindful that this must always be a forum for the presentation of solid, wellconstructed arguments backed up with facts and with reasoning explained. That is why we have a maximum permitted length of 500 words.

I will also sometimes make changes to correct grammar, punctuation and syntax, but here the aim is to have as light a touch as possible. The intention is to help the reader get his or her point across, to increase understanding and of course grammar and punctuation are useful tools for this (as is in the classic example of a man eating chicken and a man-eating chicken). But there is no place for pedantry.

Then we have edits made on the grounds on taste and tone. The Herald is a quality broadsheet and we don’t like, for example, to go around calling people morons, no matter how idiotic they might appear. And Bojo and Wee Krankie have their place, but that place is in the redtops.

Other than that, it’s pretty much anything goes – as long as we stay clear of the defamation and contempt of court laws.

Right, over to you.