Daily Archives: June 20, 2010

I haven’t been blogging much because… well a number of reasons. One of which is that I am in my final course for the SFU Writing & Publishing Program. I am in a certificate program for editing. While looking through some notes to complete my project, I came across a print out one of my instructors shared. I thought it would be appropriate to share it here. A good editor will pick every nit. No use accusing them of nit-picking. It’s their job. — Margaret Atwood What kind of person makes a good editor? When hiring new staff, I look for such useful attributes as genius, charisma, adaptability, and disdain for high wages. I also look for signs of a neurotic trait called compulsiveness, which in one form is indispensable to editors, and in another disabling. — Arthur Plotnik Good editors are not obsessed with commas, spacing around headings, or parallelism. We are obsessed with readers and their ability to understand printed words and thoughts as effortlessly as possible. — Mary J. Scroggins If you do not tolerate a certain level of anxiety over a considerable length of time (say, an entire career), then you are probably not constituted to be an editor. — Gerald Gross The writer’s job is to write while the editor’s job is to worry. — Gregory Clark If you look at any list of great modern writers such as Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, and F. Scott Fitzgerald, you’ll notice two things about them: (1) they [...]