Structural Editing vs. Proofreading: “Lipstick on a pig”
I’m good at finding errors—the surface-level errors, like errors in usage, grammar, and punctuation. Every fall, friends and family bring me their college admissions essays, and I’m always able to find mistakes. I gravitate to the copyediting/proofreading level of editing because that’s what comes easiest to me.
Structural edits are harder for me to articulate and harder to fix. As an undergraduate, I worked in my university’s writing center, where we helped students from all majors with their college writing assignments. We weren’t supposed to re-write or edit, but to “guide” students to make their own edits by giving helpful feedback.
Most of the time, what students (especially those who didn’t speak English natively) wanted us to do was proofread. They didn’t want us to make suggestions that would mean they had to make major structural, organizational, or content changes.
Structural edit suggestions were often ignored, so many of these student papers were later turned in as ”lipstick on a pig” papers—with perfect spelling, grammar, and punctuation but with skewed reasoning, awkward organization, and lack of clarity.
I’ve noticed the same trend with high school students writing college admissions essays. They are more than happy to fix surface-level errors I point out but reluctant to make changes in topic choice, organization, or structure. They feel they’ve already done the writing and just want to do a “quick fix” and submit.
One takeaway from the Corbin reading is that I should meet with these students early in the writing process, not just at the end. I could save them time and heartache by re-directing them when needed, before they have written the entire essay.
Editing as Quality Assurance: Editing is magic
Fred Vultee said, “Even if editing is still hard to see with the naked eye, the audience can see its absence quite clearly.” No one knows if you have a good editor, only if you don’t. And the only errors the user sees are the ones that aren’t edited.
My takeaway here: As an editor, I will need to persuade my clients of my value. I can do this by showing that my services provide QA because they ensure the content is easily understood, easily retrieved, well-written, and complete. Editing is magic.
Self-editing: Why it doesn’t work
In my current position as a contract resume writer, I do my own editing. After writing a resume, I step away for a day or two before putting on my proofreading eyes. But those eyes aren’t perfect and sometimes miss a stray comma or a double space (the horror!). According to Corbin, as the writer, I don’t have the perspective to edit my own work. I need a new reader with fresh eyes.
Why don’t I and the other resume writers edit each other’s work? For the same reason discussed in the reading…it would take away from our work productivity (which translates to less pay). But I have seen firsthand, as stated in the article, that “self-editing…is both expensive and likely to fail.”
Back in the game: My career goals
Right now, I’m happy in my resume-writing role. I love the variety of the work and clients and the schedule flexibility. And now that I’m becoming trained as a professional editor, I feel justified in charging when I give feedback on college admissions essays.
I shouldn’t have been surprised to learn that structural editors make more money hourly than copyeditors/proofreaders. I’ve always gravitated to the low-hanging fruit of copyediting, but my goal in this course is to improve my structural editing skills. My eventual career goal is to work as an editor for a company, or to start freelance editing.
Something critical I’ve learned in my study this week is that when freelance editing, I need to clearly define my purpose and scope. In other words, what type of editing does the client want? Is it structural editing? Or just proofreading? Or something comprehensive? Failure to agree on the expected purpose (and associated fees) would make for frustrated clients. And a frustrated editor.