The devil in green eyeshades

I have recently read two nonfiction Christian books which attempt to persuade the reader to adopt the authors’ positions, and, as is the case with so many of these books, one can’t imagine them persuading anyone but the already persuaded because their arguments are so poorly presented. It’s not that they are entirely without merit; rather, they fail to anticipate objections or consider how their rhetorical style might negatively impress their readers. Odds are very good that you’ve read such a book yourself.

This has reminded me of the great value of a good editor. I note, from their acknowledgement pages, that both these books received any amount of editorial comment from any number of readers during their manuscript stages. Thus, I should clarify that by “good editor” I mean “an editor who doesn’t much care for the author’s position or, for that matter, the author himself.”

Writers are a vain lot: they love and dote on every precious phrase over which they’ve long toiled. They need a hostile editor, one willing, no, eager to say “That makes no sense, and the fact you wrote it suggests that you yourself are utterly lacking in sense.” Writers need to see the holes in their arguments so they can be filled, to be told their style is precious and off-putting so they will write clearly and winsomely, and to be told when they've written a run-on sentence. Writers (and here I grudgingly include myself) need editors with standards so high they can’t be met by anything not directly inspired by the Holy Spirit. Writers need editors who will make them WORK, and then work harder still.

In a now-old Doonesbury strip, Garry Trudeau had a journalist call editors “devils in green eyeshades.” Indeed, and now that self-publishing has become eye-poppingly inexpensive, we need more of them.