The dos and don’ts of subbing

By Hajrah Mumtaz

Given the slew of information that surrounds most people interested in the world and the many things that happen to it, it is easy to miss some of the most delicious pieces. In the week past, one of these was the unnerving Coren email affair which I may never have stumbled upon had it not been written about on the pages of The Guardian – or, as the article author Laura Barton put it, had it not been “leaked in all its wonderfully expletive glory.”

First, the back-story: the newspaper editing process. Stories are sent to a subeditor, whose often thankless job it is to clean up the grammar, check for clarity and coherence, make sure there are no ugly growths of error or inconsistency and finally, ensure that it follows the publication’s style guide and tone. In a daily, the job is quite high-pressure because of the time constraints and the sheer volume of work, and the subbing therefore tends to follow a pattern that can be quite brutal. In magazines, conversely, the luxury of time allows subbers to treat their work as an exercise in creativity, subtly pruning here, touching up there, encouraging into flower in another place. What is essential is the unerring ability to detect bad grammar, the inelegant phrase or the incomplete metaphor. The best of subeditors manage to weave their magic so discreetly, using the original words and phrases, that the reader cannot discern exactly where any changes were made at all.

In most cases, this process ensures that the printed article is of the highest quality possible under the deadline. The fallout, however, is the bitter war waged between writers and subeditors. I can’t put it better than Barton, who wrote: “There is, it must be said, something of a long-standing tension between writers and subeditors. We writers are rather protective of our words, prone to filing late and flouncing about and are altogether a tad precious. In short, subeditors view us as the little Lord Fauntleroys of the office and we in turn view them as our evil nemeses, hellbent on our undoing.”

Subeditors, of course, view themselves as the experts protecting the fort – which I think is quite true – and infallible and justified in all that they do – which is not.

So sometimes, Fort Subber takes a hit, as was the case when some poor subeditor of The Times failed to resist the temptation of altering one word – one single word – in an article submitted by the publication’s restaurant critic, Giles Coren. In an expletive-laden email in which he relieved himself mightily of all his spleen, Coren explained at length the three reasons he had had for using that one word and no other, what implications and memory triggers he had been aiming for, and managed, in the process, to verbally strip the subeditor responsible – and perhaps the entire race of subeditors – of all dignity, credibility or self-esteem.

Dawn’s style guide prevents me from quoting the bulk of the email – I urge you to look it up on the web – but here’s how it starts off:

“Chaps, I’m mightily pissed off . . . I don’t really like people tinkering with my copy for the sake of tinkering. I do not enjoy the suggestion that you have a better ear or eye for how I want my words to read than I do . . . It was the final sentence. Final sentences are very, very important. A piece builds to them, they are the little jingle that the reader takes with him into the weekend.

“I wrote: ‘I can’t think of a nicer place to sit this spring over a glass of rosé and watch the boys and girls in the street outside smiling gaily to each other, and wondering where to go for a nosh.’ It appeared as ‘I can’t think of a nicer place to sit this spring over a glass of rosé and watch the boys and girls in the street outside smiling gaily to each other, and wondering where to go for nosh.’

“There is no length issue. This is someone thinking, ‘I’ll just remove this indefinite article because Coren is an illiterate **** and I know best.”

Coren goes on to such heights of offensiveness that I, being a subeditor, felt myself growing incandescently angry on behalf of The Times’ staffer. Try walking a mile in a subber’s shoes, I thought. Spend eight hours a day cleaning up terrible copy, trying to sift a grain of meaning from the chaff of the dismal literary flourishes attempted by too many writers, and then have some idiot complain about the subtle shades of meanings lost by a change in one word – I repeat, one word – from the multiple thousands printed in that day’s / week’s / month’s issue!

Yet Coren has a valid point. In editing copy, the greatest danger lies in making unnecessary alterations. Particularly when dealing with a good writer, one who knows his grammar and is familiar with the rules of progression, it is better by far to allow him to keep his writing style. Over-editing makes all the articles in a publication feel as though they were written by the same person. Letting writers keep their own words, on the other hand, allows a particular style to be associated with the name, which is invaluable. And if there’s a comma where you think it shouldn’t be, or a phrase you don’t quite like, let it be on the writer’s head if he’s proved his competence in general.

Impatient with writers’ easily-hurt feelings I may be, but I too have on occasion complained about something as minor as a comma being altered.

Post-script: The apostrophe in the headline is quite correctly placed. Really.

— hmumtaz@dawn.com