Copy Editing: Why One Should Never Assume

A reporter at my paper notes to me that we introduced an error. Since this is not about someone reading this trying to figure out who introduced the error into whose story, I will try to make this as vague as possible, which runs the risk of its being nonsensical.

Essentially, what we did is changed an "in" to an "of." The reason is that the way the sentence first read, the "of" seemed impossible. It implied that this was, say, the 170th anniversary of an institution that had only existed since 1900.

That made no sense, so it must have been that the number referred to the number of people in the institution, right? Must be wrong. Change it. Easy fix to the preposition.

The problem is that the institution, in its first years, counted its anniversaries in half-years.

(Some old newspapers did this. The "Volume" number only makes sense if you assume there were two volumes in one year.)

The reporter, aggrieved and getting calls about how this figure is very important in the tradition and the meaning and this is why we don't trust newspapers, complains. I can only apologize.

The hardest thing to do in copy editing is to not make something make sense. A hard-to-understand sentence may be a poorly written sentence. Or it may be a sentence that had to be written awkwardly because the facts are awkward.

Either way, asking "is this what this means?" can't hurt. Except it can. This story was moved very late in the cycle. Deadline approached. Copy editors in general don't like to get into elaborate discussions with reporters over things that seem obvious; we've all got our jobs to do. It could take a minute to make clear exactly what the problem is, and that's a minute that could be spent on the headline -- or another story. And heck, they're paying us to fix this stuff, right?

And to be honest, when we assume we usually get it right. But any time we assume, there's an innate 50 percent change we will be wrong. The difference between the two figures is that copy editors are very intelligent folks who usually make the right choice.

"Never assume" and "always do the math" are my two most important copy editing rules. In this case we did #2 quickly and then assumed when the answer didn't add up.