Promise to Subscribers
Feast or famine: Living on the deadline
My zeroth rule of editing is: Do No Harm. The moment you touch a document, you risk corrupting it in a million ways, not least through a machine crash. Some people think an editor’s job is essentially to rewrite texts. In fact, a “rewrite” is the absolute worst-case disaster scenario. There is copy editing and there is content editing, the latter including rewrites. All of my work is copy editing and proofreading. Most of my assignments these days are for major international organizations, including United Nations agencies, and the material I edit is generally very well structured and written.
However, there are sometimes 14 language defaults in one Word document, including Asian language defaults that change all the spacings. And hundreds of references with thousands of authors, each and every name to be carefully checked. The sixth IPCC report has 20 pages of contributors. If you want to cite this list of contributors, you have to name all 19 editors of the report.
For every facet of my editing work, I have systems. For example, the very first thing I do with a document is save it with the prefix ORIGINAL_ and then firmly lock it. If anything goes wrong, I can always go back to the pristine version and track the damage.
This is a big secret, so here goes. If your editing systems are good enough—especially as a newspaper sub—you should literally be able to work in your sleep, in fact in a trance much deeper than sleep. A bomb could go off and we would hardly notice.
For four years I worked for Cactus Communications, doing academic editing in econometrics and statistics, mostly Japanese, Chinese and Korean authors. Cactus is the largest academic editing enterprise on the planet, as far as I know. They are based in Mumbai, three-and-a-half hours ahead of my time in the Kingdom of Eswatini. My deadlines were completely insane and I was regularly called by the Cactus desk at 4 a.m. begging me to take a job so they could clear their board. The fact that I had uploaded a huge assignment at 3 a.m. did not draw their attention.
Cactus has an attractive rule for its clients: if we miss the deadline, you don’t pay. Which means the editor doesn’t get paid. In hundreds of assignments I missed one deadline, due a power failure. But this pressure often found me working at insane hours of the night, fighting with Chinese production and population statistics, or Japanese authors using linear regression to prove Marx’s prophecies about the evolution of societies. Much of my editing was for government agencies, including the Japanese Cabinet Office, the Korean Joint Chiefs of Staff and the Hong Kong Police Academy. Everyone in Asia uses Cactus.
To sit at 3 a.m. with the world dark around you, trying to make sense of a poorly translated and totally convoluted study, where you find yourself desperately pasting Korean phrases into translation engines to find something that makes sense, means that all your systems are running on autopilot. You have to work at so many different levels—phrasing and idiom, grammar, scientific data and arguments, statistical package jargon, formulas running over entire pages, tables with tiny footnotes, academic rules and conventions, making polite comments to dim authors, harmonizing text with graphics and graphs, sometimes scores of tiny graphs, eliminating redundancies and repetitions (Japanese authors are unbelievably repetitive), and always watching the clock, practising ruthless triage to concentrate your best efforts when and where they are most needed—that there is no possible way you can keep track of it all.
Consciously: I save and I back up and I brace for a crash. The following may be blasphemous, but it is a newsroom saying: Jesus saves, and the copy editor saves.
At the end of each academic paper, there is a section outlining its contribution to the literature. After I had polished up a study and located it properly within the subject landscape—which authors often do very badly—I would actually be the world authority on current research in this field. And then 15 minutes later, I would have entirely forgotten what the study was about.
I can assure you that as an editor, your ability to forget is much more important than your ability to remember.
Welcome to the world of the invisibles.
1. There’s a Need
ChatGPT and its cohort really do change the game. Machines have appropriated human language, our most precious gift, our very selves and souls. Yet, how can you blame a student on deadline with an essay for getting such easy and instant help?
This revolution really does level the playing field. But will it flatten all the players in the process?
I am completely certain that somewhere in the world, editors are being hired right now to muss AI texts up a bit, so that they look more human.
Spotting AI is akin to detecting plagiarism. I am lucky to have encountered very few cases of plagiarism in my editing. I wish authors knew just how easy it is to spot, however. I often work with “invisibles” on, so I can see double spaces and paragraph marks. If you copy and paste text from an email or textbook, it often carries across with non-breaking spaces. If you have the invisibles on, these appear as little circles between letters:
In these cases, it is trivial to spot where a major clump of text has been pasted in. The passage might have been copied from the author’s own email and may not indicate plagiarism at all; but if I do an Internet search and find that exact wording online, you are busted, pal.
I did once catch a bad case of plagiarism using the above technique, while editing with Cactus. The author was from the Third World, the paper was for a minor journal on agriculture and fishing, and I decided just to note in a very gentle comment that some of these passages appeared identical to text in online articles and should maybe be revised.
This earned me a severe reprimand from Cactus regarding my client handling. I never got around to inquiring whether this was because I had horrendously offended an esteemed client by warning him quietly that there was a painfully visible problem with his work; or because I didn’t bust him hard enough and flag a major issue with my supervisors. My guess is the former.
So far, I have not encountered anything that looks like AI-generated content in my work, but I have been looking with interest at various scripts produced by ChatGPT and similar applications. So far, the best way to spot AI content seems to be via grammatical and logical constructions that appear very good and smooth on the surface, but are curiously stilted and awkward when you look closer. In almost every case, though, there is at least one glaring error either of fact or of grammar. I will give examples in due course.
While writing this piece, I heard a headline on the BBC World Service: Artificial intelligence could lead to extinction, experts warn. The Centre for AI Safety has issued a statement to this effect, supported by Sam Altman, CEO of ChatGPT-maker OpenAI; Demis Hassabis, chief executive of Google DeepMind; and Dario Amodei of Anthropic.
We must treat AI as a threat on the level of nuclear war, say the AI makers.
Well, thanks a heap, fellas. Glad to know you’re awake on the job, busy shutting the stable door after the horses have bolted. Your next task, of course, is to make sure the foxes are securely locked in the henhouse for the night. Better get your ducks in a row.
In the end, however, if anyone’s going to save our collective skins from this sudden-doom-by-chatbot scenario, it will probably the obsessive-compulsive editors of the world, the ones who routinely spot the atrocities, toxicities, malignancies, glitches, bugs and fakes. And sigh and fix them, if there’s any possible way to do it.
The following is a true story. I once replaced a copy editor called Fanie at an award-winning business magazine in Johannesburg. Fanie is a white Afrikaner who spent the whole of apartheid frequenting black brothels, he wrote a book about it and got quite famous. He took us to watch a World Cup game in 2006, at a quiet and classy bar with good TV. And then we saw some very good-looking women going in and out and realized where we were.
Everywhere Fanie goes, he carries a felt-tipped pen. In all the many dens of vice he frequents, he meticulously corrects the grammar on each and every sign and notice, like the discreet little placard on the street directing us to the Club on the 2nd Floor. You might get ripped blind in Johannesburg, but the con-text is impeccable.
2. Ask Yourself This Simple Question
Specifically, please ask yourself: why am I here? Of all webpages?
Being an editor means you are always a little ahead of the game. We leave tomorrow’s newspaper on a bar counter, with the mistakes circled in red. If you are lucky, we leave next week’s Sunday colour supplement in a coffee shop. We know all about the debate that will be raging in the Journal of Post-Keynesian Economics next quarter.
We also know a little about what’s going on in Yemen, because we are trying to get a payment from there, if the NGO can manage it in between the bombing.
If any part of this genuinely murky world interests you, for any reason, then please feel free to subscribe. The issues arising from editing, such as fact checking, affect all sorts of people in all sorts of ways. I do not want to limit the audience here.
To a large extent, though, I am responding to a growing interest in people about freelance editing, in many cases because they want to work from home. If I only manage to shatter a few illusions about this undertaking, the whole effort will have been worthwhile. The world needs a strong dose of reality right now.
When I applied to Cactus Communications in 2014, they told me that three out of every 1,000 applicants were eventually accepted as editors. Being an editor is a lot like being a chef: you can either take the heat or you can’t, and the kitchen itself very rapidly sorts out those who can’t.
But by its nature, editing is a hidden profession, with the heat coming down in very different ways; so I am trying to shine a lightly edited light into its darker corners—in the media, in academia, in international organizations, in sometimes surprisingly big business. I once edited part of the handbook regulating global carbon-capture credits, including the chapter with the main statistical model. It was basically a single vast equation, summing over every country on Earth, including Swaziland, as my little nation was then called. The whole process looked very dubious when you saw what was being swept under the carpet.
But I edited it and took the money. And you can too.
If any of the above pushes a button for you, then please ringa da bell below. Interest is the only price of admission here.
3. The Three Phases of Existence
According to Substack: “Readers love clarity. Be clear when you explain what they should expect: how often will you be posting?”
The key word here is “explain”. There are three phases to my existence:
Looking for jobs;
Negotiating contracts;
On deadline.
Nothing can predict the rhythm with which these three phases flow. It can take a month to negotiate a one-week assignment. The institutional bureaucracy is often horrendous. Every country has different labour laws and requirements. In many cases, the admin is far harder and far more stressful than the job itself.
But this pain is the exact price of entry to the consultant world. You need to negotiate the bureaucracy smoothly and professionally. I get quite a few jobs simply because my turnaround time on admin is so fast, I finish before other candidates begin. I have Word and PDF signatures scanned and ready. Signed documents are returned within minutes.
When I am on a series of deadlines, and they do hunt in packs, I am quite simply unavailable for anything else, especially writing for publication. I learned long ago not to try make “quick” posts online when deadline is looming. You always get trapped in a comments box for far longer than you intended, only to mess the whole thing up.
In particular when on deadline, document corruptions and machine crashes can turn life into a serious nightmare. I have gone through five computers in one assignment.
What I can promise in terms of newsletters is therefore in line with the eternal struggle for existence: it is feast or famine, folks. You will know exactly when I am off and on deadline, I promise you. I intend to be fairly prolific on this platform, but let’s not get ahead of ourselves.
However, unless there is a real calamity, you will without question get at least one substantial newsletter per week, basically starting now, Monday mid-morning my time, which is UTC + 2 hours. This is the same time zone as Cairo, Jerusalem and Kiev. The idea is to hit the week running with something topical.
With regard to queries and comments: please see “feast or famine” above. I am a fast typist and will do my very best to respond to all serious queries, especially on current issues. Please be patient, however, I will get there eventually. My eyes may have the ten-thousand-yard stare, my hands may be shaking from too much black coffee, but I will get there.
4. Your Agency Please
Substack’s payment company Stripe does not service Africa, but I am very happy to offer this content for free anyway. I have another platform for payments that will be activated when the time is right. Even there, content will be free, the plan being to charge $1 a month to join the discussion. I am going for scale and volume, and the doleful dollar, she is still worth something around here.
I said earlier that your interest is the only price of admission. Attention remains the most valuable commodity on the Internet. But there is something far more significant that you can bring to the party; and this is your agency. Whether this means getting a job in editing, or improving your own writing, or finessing the academic publishing game, the point is to flip the script-handling script in your own favour.
I have edited quite a few documents recently involving people with disabilities. All of them used the slogan, “Nothing for us, without us.” Agency is hot right now, let’s get with it.
5. A Final Manifesto
Everything I am writing here is dedicated to one end, one aim, one overriding principle: professionalism. If you want to work as a consultant editor in this extremely high-pressure domain, every single aspect of your practice must be rock solid. For me, professionalism is just the highest form of respect you can show to your fellow workers. Professionalism is humanity at its best.