Roger Siebert, senior editor at Texas Bar Books, Publications SIG co-chair, and Communications Editorial Committee co-chair

Bryan Garner¹ once asked Bill Walsh² what qualities make a good editor. Walsh said that it helps to be borderline obsessive compulsive and to have a dirty mind. He explained that a good editor obsesses over details but doesn’t obsess so much that the project never goes to press and that you need a dirty mind to catch potentially embarrassing double entendres³.

As an editor, I’m inspired by people like Maxwell Perkins and Alfred and Blanche Knopf—people who work behind the scenes to fine-tune and launch masterpieces. Occasionally an editor will play a larger role, as Perkins did with The Great Gatsby and Look Homeward, Angel, but those are exceptions. The norm is that if I do my job right, my contribution to a work should go unnoticed. It’s only editors’ mistakes—heavy handedness or missed errors—that get us noticed. My goal is for the author to read the finished book and think, “Damn I’m a good writer.”

Carefully edited text tends to shrink. A good author will think and rethink ideas, and because writing is thinking on paper, the manuscript an author hands an editor can be repetitive. It’s my job to turn several wordy sentences that say the same thing into a single succinct sentence that incorporates the best from each. Blaise Pascal famously wrote (translated from French), “Sorry this letter is so long; I didn’t have time to write a shorter one.” My job is to take that time, so the writer doesn’t have to.

Nor do I expect authors to turn in work that doesn’t have misspellings or isn’t suffering a death of a thousand misplaced commas. The author’s job is to keep an eye on the big picture and show how all the concepts work together to paint that picture. If an author obsesses over grammar and punctuation, that picture can get blurry.

That will, however, inevitably lead to sentences that need more than simple copyediting. Some will have such a failure in grammar or punctuation that they’re nonsensical. Others will lack detail and be open to multiple interpretations. In those instances, I’ll send the author a few possible substitute sentences, each making sense of the author’s original in a different way or each restricting the meaning to only one of the original’s possible interpretations. Then the author can simply answer, “Yes, this one.” A query an author can answer in seconds is one I won’t have to follow up on, saving us both time.

With legal publishing, though, I have to keep in mind that an author’s sentence might be vague because the law it addresses is vague. As much as it grates my instincts to leave a vague sentence untouched, it’s not my job to interpret legislation. I steel myself with the hope that I’ll be able to make the sentence more precise in a future edition, after the courts and legislature have had enough back-and-forth to make the law itself more precise.

Letting a project go is the hardest part. If I have the luxury of being able to make a first pass through a text, let it cool, make a second pass, and lather, rinse, repeat until I’m at an Oscar Wilde moment, that is, spending hours just pushing commas around,⁴ it’s time to let the book go. But having that much time is rare. Deadlines usually loom before I’ve even had the chance to move instances of “only” to immediately before what they modify and instances of “however” to immediately after the appropriate emphasis of contrast. I try to latch onto another luxury some of us in legal publishing have: we update most of our books every year or two. For those books I try to visualize going to press not as an endpoint but as a snapshot of where the book is in a continuous cycle of writing, revising, and editing. And although that way of visualizing the job never completely silences that obsessive voice in my head, it can occasionally quell it into a resigned sigh.

¹ Garner is the author of Bryan Garner’s Modern English Usage, Garner’s Dictionary of Legal Usage, and the grammar chapter in The Chicago Manual of Style.
² Walsh was copy editor at The Washington Post and authored Lapsing into a Comma; The Elephants of Style; and Yes, I Could Care Less.
³ For example, a résumé I edited many years ago landed in my inbox with the line “Beat meat and produce goals by . . . .” It went into my outbox with “Beat produce and meat goals by . . . .”
⁴ Wilde is attributed with having said, “I have been correcting the proofs of my poems. In the morning, after hard work, I took a comma out of one sentence. . . . In the afternoon, I put it back again.”