Editing as a career?

[geoff-h -at- MTL -dot- FERIC -dot- CA]

 Ron Rhodes: <<One day I hope to be an editor at a major
 publisher.>>

 Not a recommended career choice in most cases, as
 commercial publishers generally pay diddly squat, require
 long hours, and make you work with authors who make the
 dreaded subject matter expert (SME) seem like Miss Manners.
 There are definite exceptions, but you'll find much better
 editing job at a university press or a scientific research
 institute, or even as a freelancer if you're into that. Now
 if you can get onboard as a managing editor or acquisitions
 editor at a big publisher, the situation changes, but at
 the low end of the food chain, it's work you do for love,
 not money.

 <<Currently, I don't have the skills or experience to land
 the job I want ... Aside from being a great text
 editor,  what other skills I should nurture? What should I
 do to sharpen those skills?>>

 Editing requires an entirely different mindset than
 writing, and you won't find many people equally good at
 both. (I do both. That's a minor brag, though I concede I'm
 a far better editor than writer most days.) Other skills?
 Diplomacy and tact and patience, since technical and other
 writers often treat editors as badly as engineers et al.
 treat writers. Triage is another good one, since spelling
 errors are usually trivial and meaningless _compared with_
 logical and factual errors, omissions of necessary content,
 etc.; they stand out more, but they're not as important as
 more substantive matters.

 The only way to get good at editing (as with writing) is to
 actually do it. You _can't_ learn it from a book, though
 any of the dozens of books on the subject can teach you
 which skills you should actually use. USDA (United States
 Department of Agriculture) offers some good correspondence
 courses on editing; I don't have their address handy, but I
 seem to recall they have a web site with details.

 The most important skill in editing is the ability to
 empathize with your audience. I usually describe my
 profession as "professional idiot" just to catch someone's
 attention. If they still hang around long enough to find out
 whether there's a method to my madness--or just madness--I
 explain. The professional part means that I'm paid for what
 I do and I'm good at it. The "idiot" part means that my job
 is to misunderstand darn near anything a normal reader would
 eventually figure out, figure out what the problem is, and
 fix it. If I can get hurt by misinterpreting the writing, I
 make sure nobody else will ever get hurt. If I can blow up
 my computer or lose data without personal injury, I make
 sure nobody will do the same. Phrased a little more
 politely, what it means is that you have to be able to adopt
 a certain naivete towards what you're editing: as soon as
 you become proficient with the material, you start making
 the same mistakes as the author (i.e., you automatically
 understand things your readers probably won't understand),
 and it's tough to be able to distance yourself enough from
 the material to be a reader advocate. In a nutshell, that's
 editing. (Some who know me would also claim I'm an amateur
 idiot, which means I do lots of stupid things I'm not paid
 for, and apparently am very good at doing. Mea culpa.
 <grin>)

 <<Ask my current employer for more responsibility -- like
 managing a large documentation project.>>

 That has little to do with editing, though some editors
 (e.g., me) do end up with all kinds of project management
 responsibilities too.

 <<Adopt an editing process like the STC or JPL approach.>>

 Formalizing the approach doesn't really help. Editing is
 all about the ability to misunderstand a writer's prose
 the same way your audience will misunderstand, and fix
 the problem. One thing I do recommend to new editors is
 that they should learn one new knee-jerk reflex per
 month, and work on knowing when the reflex has been
 triggered so you can do something about it: that way, a
 lot of the minor changes become automatic reflexes and
 leave your mind free to concentrate on the really
 important issues, such as comprehension.

 One thing that it does pay to formalize is the
 recognition that most good editors takes _at least_
 three passes through a document. Pass 1 lets you catch
 the serious problems of comprehension and illogic, while
 patching grammatical errors and typos as you go. Pass 2
 lets you look more at any sentence mechanics you missed
 while focusing on other issues during Pass 1. Pass 3 is
 the proofreading (of the final layout).

 <<Read challenging books and periodicals and try to find
 mistakes.>>

 That's certainly helpful, but I don't suspect it's very
 productive. Most presses do still edit their books before
 publishing them--though the evidence for this is growing
 fainter--so you'll be looking for relatively minor things
 such as typos. The only way to get good at editing is to
 start with the raw ore and try to turn it into refined
 metal.

 <<Put myself into a team writing environment.>>

 Other than providing authors to work with, this probably
 won't help much.

 <<For those who ARE editors, should I run for my life, or
 do you truly enjoy your work?>>

 I wouldn't trade it for any job in the world, except
 perhaps official personal masseur to the Sports Illustrated
 swimsuit models. (You gotta have your dreams!)

 --Geoff Hart     @8^{)}  geoff-h -at- mtl -dot- feric -dot- ca
 Disclaimer: Speaking for myself, not FERIC.