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A copy editor’s job is supposed to be surgical: Go in, make as few cuts as possible, clean up, get out — and do it quickly (deadlines people!) — so their finest work, writer’s bias aside, should be barely noticeable. The big stuff? The thematic issues, the shoddy workmanship, the inability to tell a story? That should be the province of folks who aren’t obliged to worry about proper grammar. Still, inevitably, stuff gets through and, in addition to serving as the syntax police, the copy desk will find itself asking just how the fuck whatever piece of garbage it might be combing through made it all the way down the chain without a lede or any sort of conflict, but with six different types of factual errors. (Let my personal experience stand in for the general population of Editorialland when I say that this is the sort of thing that tends to set them off.)

Which is how, sometimes, the copy folks find themselves in the ghostwriting business. And though that result may not be the most efficient use of a publication’s editorial staff, it is something that — if it happens at an infrequent rate — can be tolerated. Unless, of course, the copy desk sucks at composition (and someone up the line doesn’t bother to fix that mess). Whether or not this sort of editorial goatfuck befell the staff of the New Yorker sometime before the publication of its August 3rd issue, I can’t say. But, judging by the stunted prose (at least by its high, feature-y standards) on exhibit there, it seems like something was amiss. Fortunately, for our purposes, the magazine ran a two-part Siberian travelogue that allows interested parties an apples-to-apples look at what happens when someone falls asleep at their keyboard.

A description of the Siberian landscape from part one:

The problem with Siberia’s big rivers is the direction they flow. Most of Siberia’s rivers go north or join others that do, and their waters end up in the Arctic Ocean. Even the Amur, whose general inclination is to the northeast and whose destination is the Pacific, empties into the stormy sea of Okhotsk. In the spring, north-flowing rivers thaw upstream while they’re still frozen at their mouths. This causes them to back up. This creates swamps. Western Siberia has the largest swamps in the world. In much of Siberia the land doesn’t do much of anything besides gradually sag northward to the Arctic. The rivers of western Siberia flow so slowly that they hardly move at all. There the rivers run muddy; in eastern Siberia, with its real mountains and sharper drop to the Pacific, many of the rivers run clear.

As many of my colleagues (and perhaps readers) will attest, I am not a copy editor. But there are a number of things that caused me a bit of grammatical pain when I first read the section reprinted above. Here, the prose seems to never pick up any sort of momentum and, at one point — “[t]his causes them to back up. This creates swamps. Western Siberia has the largest swamps in the world. In much of Siberia the land doesn’t do much of anything besides gradually sag northward to the Arctic. The rivers of western Siberia flow so slowly that they hardly move at all.” — it seems like everyone was doing their respective level best to re-create an eighth grade geography paper.

Now take a look at this description of the Siberian landscape from part two. Remember, same author:

After the Kuznetsk Basin came a long interval of meadows. We saw dark-clothed people working the hay fields in big groups as in an old bucolic painting or riding to or from the work in horse-drawn flatbed wagons whose hard rubber wheels bouncing on the uneven pavement made the flesh of the passengers faces jiggle fast. In this more peaceful region, we camped one night on the banks of the Chulym river at a popular spot with a gravel bank more convenient for bathing and washing than the usual swampy mud.

This passage is a well-assembled, far less halting example. The only difference? The date on the issue.

Sure, there’s a question of preference: Some editors like to chop sentences (especially lengthy descriptive ones) into more digestible fragments. Others prefer something with a bit more flow. But, in either case, it’s rare to see such screaming evidence of an editor’s eraser — even if they’ve had to completely rewrite the thing.

Besides, this is the New Yorker, what’s supposed to be the pinnacle of feature-style, well-written journalism. For any other publication this sort of thing would be bad — for them, it’s a relative travesty.

TAGS:copy editors, copy nerds, siberia, the New Yorker, travelogue

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