Yes, it’s easy to criticize the work of an editorial intern, even one who is a Fulbright scholar and has a master’s degree. Still, where was a decent copy editor at The Nation when Drew Haxby wrote about the sexuality debate within Anglicanism? For that matter, why should any copy editor have to deal with so much stilted writing?
Consider:
In the past
five30 years, the Episcopal Church hasfound itself pushed tostood at the forefront of the culture wars. [One could write “positioned itself at the forefront,” but then one might sound right wing, so we’ll stand on the side of caution.] After Gene Robinson, an openly gay man with alongtermlong-term partner, was elected Bishop of New Hampshire in 2003, Anglican bishops from all over the world quickly decried the move. Conservative congregations in theUSUnited States and Canada leftthe national churchesvarious dioceses. Some aligned themselves with the Anglican Church of Nigeria and its outspokenhomophobic[Needs quotes.] leader, Archbishop Peter Akinola. On December 3of this year, [Evident in your dateline.] these conservatives announced the creation of a newdenominationwould-be Anglican province, one that will compete openly with the Episcopalians for congregations and tithes. [If this movement is but a fraction of Episcopalians, as your story argues further along, where’s the competition?]While not recognized by the Anglican Communion, the[Dangling modifier and irrelevant, considering that the four instruments of the Anglican Communion have not addressed the question of a new province.] The New York Times described this latest move as “the biggest challenge yet to the authority of the Episcopal Church,” which “threatens the fragile unity of the Anglican Communion.”
TheAnglican conservatives have argued that the Episcopal Church acted too rashly in its acceptance of gays and lesbians into the leadership of the church. Archbishop Gregory Venables of the Anglican Church of the Southern Cone ofAmerica,America called Gene Robinson’s election “a slap in the face of the Anglican Church around the world.”ReverendThe Rev. John [See AP Stylebook.] Nyhan of St. James the Just described it as “hubris ofBiblicalbiblical [See AP Stylebook.] proportions, and that’s a polite way of saying diabolical.” [Nyhan left St. James the Just Episcopal Church in Franklin Square, N.Y., a few years ago. Did you interview him before he left that parish? If not, credit the reporter who did.]… One
raremoment of drama came in 1995, [If this story is so lacking in drama, why is it worth reporting?] when the assisting bishopBishopof Newark, N.J.,was put onfaced possible trial within the church for his ordination of an openly gaypriestdeacon. [A church court dropped charges against the Rt. Rev. Walter Righter after two pretrial hearings.]Again, the Episcopal leadership looked to findEpiscopal bishops sought a middle way: while “not giving an opinion on the morality of same-gender relationships,”it refused to convictthey dismissed the case on the grounds that “there is no core doctrine prohibiting the ordination of a non-celibate homosexual person living in a faithful and committed sexual relationship,” and that “the Anglican tradition has encouraged theological diversity.”… Roughly 100,000 Anglicans in the United States and Canada have left their respective national churches, less than five percent of the 2.3 million members. [The Episcopal Church Center now places this figure at just over 2.1 million members in the United States. The Anglican Church of Canada claims about 800,000 members. This decreases the percentage to 3.4 — if your figure of 100,000 is accurate.] “It’s a tiny fraction of the church,” said Jim Naughton, of the Episcopal Diocese of Washington. “Yet it’s being played as if the church is splitting.”
As many Episcopalians have pointed out,[Be specific or don’t bother with this.]the conservatives did not have the internal backing to overturn Robinson’s election — even with the efforts of the African Churches[No Anglican council has voted on a motion, so far as their records indicate, to “overturn Robinson’s election.” Some African provinces, such as Kenya, Nigeria, Rwanda and Uganda, did repudiate it.]and several fundamentalist[See AP Stylebook.]lobbies.[Cite examples.]Their recent decision to disaffiliate is a last ditch gamble to assert their preeminence in North America.[What preeminence? Remember, this is a story about The Episcopal Church.]How it will play out remains to be seen, but in the meantime the Episcopal Church might finally start to move on.[Cliche-ridden, dull and — most remarkably — condescending!]
“Little girl drawing with blue pencil,” used under a Wikimedia Commons license.
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Comments (40) |
January 5, 2009, at 7:11 pm
It’s too bad you were not the intern’s teacher at some point.
January 5, 2009, at 7:42 pm
Mmm - definitely using an unadorned term like “homophobic” to describe Archbishop Akinola is letting your bias show on where exactly you stand on the question.
Either don’t use the term, or if you mean “opposed to the ordination of non-celibate gays”, say so. Otherwise, why not go the whole hog and just call him a fascist?
January 5, 2009, at 7:44 pm
That was interesting. Fun to see how the changing of this and that word and phrase can keep the same gist of the story, while altering the overall feeling of the point being made. More of that would be fun.
January 5, 2009, at 8:14 pm
I agree with Dave G., I enjoyed this style of post.
January 5, 2009, at 8:29 pm
One quibble, I think ‘leadership of the Episcopal Church’ is better than ‘Episcopal Bishops’. All bishops are leaders. But not all leaders are Bishops. There are Deans, Canons, Theologians, Academics, Monks and Nuns who are also included in the leadership of the Episcopal Church.
January 5, 2009, at 8:36 pm
I take your point, dalea, but in this case — two pretrial hearings of Walter Righter — the story was entirely about the actions of a nine-bishop court. The same court has since been expanded to include priests and laity.
January 5, 2009, at 9:09 pm
A further small correction—Gregory Venables isn’t an archbishop … like Katherine Jefferts Schori he is a Presiding Bishop —- his title is “obispo primero” of the Southern Cone. I have received letters on this point correcting my own writing.
January 5, 2009, at 9:19 pm
Thanks, George, and I too made the mistake by not correcting Mr. Haxby’s story.
Your pointing it out also made me aware that I had misplaced some text relating to Bishop Venables’ province, and I’ve corrected that.
January 5, 2009, at 9:37 pm
The only thing that surprised me about the original piece is that it didn’t start out with, “It was a dark and stormy night….”
January 5, 2009, at 9:55 pm
Can someone create a website that takes every AP story and fixes it like this? That would be news worth reading! (Yes, I know this is how they are supposed to look when they are originally published, but that is probably asking too much.)
January 5, 2009, at 9:57 pm
That was fun. I write these comments in the (probably vain) hope of becoming a better writer, making your effort helpful as well fun.
The ACNA is claiming an average Sunday attendance of 100,000, so the correct comparison would be to the average Sunday attendance of the Episcopal Church - about 727,000 in 2007 plus whatever it was in Canada (reasonable guess = 230,000). I’ve been playing with the numbers for awhile now and, really, her point was meaningless: the numbers are just too complicated for meaningful comparisons.
But if I may say so, for lovers of stats, the Episcopal Church is the bomb:
http://www.episcopalchurch.org/research.htm
January 5, 2009, at 10:28 pm
Oh wow.
Also note — 2009 minus rare moment of drama in 1995 equals, oh, 13 or 14 years at the very least. The story’s math goes off the rails, even if you are only working with the information that The Nation bothered to print.
Please explore this:
http://www.getreligion.org/?page_id=3202&query=Anglican+timeline&submit.x=0&submit.y=0
January 5, 2009, at 10:39 pm
The departure of the largest Episcopal church, Christ Church in Plano, Texas, as left the US Episcopal church.
January 5, 2009, at 10:59 pm
Re:
Again, the Episcopal leadership looked to findEpiscopal bishops sought a middle way: while “not giving an opinion on the morality of same-gender relationships,” itrefused to convictdismissed the case … .You need to keep “leadership” or else change “it” to “they.”
January 5, 2009, at 11:01 pm
Drew + Haxby = Moron
January 5, 2009, at 11:23 pm
When ideology trumps truth and fact, what chance does correct grammar have?
January 5, 2009, at 11:58 pm
“…
toorashly…” Unless you mean as opposed to “rashly enough.”January 6, 2009, at 12:09 am
I’m pretty sure it is “cliche ridden,” not “ridded.”
Of course, the term “cliche ridden” is very cliche.
January 6, 2009, at 12:36 am
Mookmook- I think “cliche ridded” may have been a typo for “cliche riddled.”
Editor’s notes in brackets do not need to avoid cliches if cliches are apt. It is the published word that must be fresh.
January 6, 2009, at 12:58 am
Well, what did you expect? It’s like asking a Klansman to write a nice fluff peice about MLK.
January 6, 2009, at 1:16 am
[…] Ever wonder what a Copy Editor does? Filed under: Posts — buttle @ 22:16 Apparently many writers at The Nation don’t know, either. But a good one can deliver quite the smackdown. […]
January 6, 2009, at 2:07 am
1) I’m sorry, but I cannot accept that hyphen you wanted to insert into “longterm.” When in doubt, live with the evolution of language and lose the hypens; they are an aesthetic evil.
2) Have we established that The Nation uses AP style? Even if it does use AP rather than Words Into Type or Chicago Manual of Style, each publication has its own house style, which takes precedence over the published style manual it uses. So unless you have access to The Nation’s own style guide, I don’t know that you have the authority to style this story.
3) There is a difference between fact-checking and copyediting.
4) There is also a difference between editorializing and using “stilted” language. In fact, I would argue that the less impassioned an article is, the greater its risk of appearing “stilted.”
5) Is this an issue pertaining to writing style, or do you simply disagree with the biases at The Nation? While my ideology has changed over the past couple of decades, I’ve always felt that the writing there was crisp enough; it’s merely the ideas I disagree with.
And if it is the ideas that one disagrees with, one had best be honest about it, for one’s own sake and that of one’s readers.
January 6, 2009, at 6:40 am
Christiana and D.C. al Fina, thank you for the further fixes in what I wrote. I will change those.
Joy, thank you for your several points. House stylebooks aside, referring to a religious leader merely as “Reverend” is incorrect grammar. If a publication chooses to use fundamentalist promiscuously, that speaks to its trustworthiness. At many publications, a copy editor doubles as a fact-checker. No competent copy editor will ignore or neglect clear factual errors. In writing this piece, I worked to limit the suggested changes to factual or grammatical errors. My first bracketed remarks are an exception, and it takes little insight to know that GetReligion starts with a different worldview than does The Nation.
January 6, 2009, at 8:25 am
Then there is “tithes” for “contributions”. “Tithe” has a specific meaning, which evidently Haxby does not know—- how many congregations of ANY self-styled-mainline denomination regularly receive tithes? It looks like he just tosses in what he vaguely considers “religious” wording. (Another example of this sort of thing was a lead in an advertising paper which tried to be clever by saying that “Catholics and Baptists share concerns about marketing mass”, when no Baptist would ever refer to their activities as “mass”.)
January 6, 2009, at 9:33 am
Joy: “There is a difference between fact-checking and copyediting.”
Copyediting most certainly includes fact checking, or at least questioning an unclear or unattributed assertion. Only looking at grammer and punctuation is called proofreading. Compare the rates of freelancers who proofread copy with those who do a professional copyedit. It’s a world of difference in skill and workload.
January 6, 2009, at 11:34 am
This is incorrect because it does not include a time period. If it is 5% in one year that’s one thing. If it’s over 100 years, not so much. Losing 5% of your membership *per year* is nothing to dismiss. If you look at the long term statistics, the Episcopal church has lost about a million members since its high point in the 60s. Going from a denomination of just over 3 million to just over 2 million is something to be concerned about — particularly when other (e.g. charismatic, evangelical) denominations are gaining membership. The conservatives that are acting as schizmatics may be more obvious, but they are only a symptom of a much, much larger ailment that the author ignores.
January 6, 2009, at 11:38 am
[…] LeBlanc provides a wonderful example from the reporting of The Nation of the frustrations of journalists who understand religion when they confront those who do […]
January 6, 2009, at 12:07 pm
Copyediting most certainly includes fact checking, or at least questioning an unclear or unattributed assertion. Only looking at grammer and punctuation is called proofreading. Compare the rates of freelancers who proofread copy with those who do a professional copyedit. It’s a world of difference in skill and workload.
The rule is: if they want a close read, they will ask for a light read, and vice versa. If one makes too many queries, they will get mad. If one makes too few, they will get mad. If one makes suggestions that are “above one’s station,” they will get mad.
And nine times out of ten, if one attempts to fact-check something one is supposed to be copyediting, they will get mad.
The most important skill in copyediting is figuring out what the client actually wants; in many situations, it lies in balancing out the preferences of Editor A with the preferences of Editor B, while keeping in mind the dictates of the style sheet and the peculiarities of Publisher C.
The biggest challenge lies in letting the author’s voice come through—even if it is, as one editor pointed out to me many years ago, “a dumb voice.”
January 6, 2009, at 12:15 pm
[…] That was my imaginary friend, Binker. Binker has strong opinions. […]
January 6, 2009, at 1:10 pm
Joy McCann: Amen!
This is the de facto vs the de jure on copyediting/factchecking/proofreading. The quality of all published material has been declining steadily as the time in which to do these time-consuming but vital tasks disappears along with the jobs themselves!
January 6, 2009, at 2:09 pm
It’s also wrong because it’s wrong. The Episcopal Church has lost 167,000 members since Gene Robinson became a bishop, and more than 200,000 since 2000, which is when the first of the current splinters occurred (that would be the Anglican Mission in America). Those are net losses, which means the numbers which actually left is higher. Those are 2007 numbers, too, which don’t yet reflect all the group departures (parishes and dioceses), so who knows how many people have “left” the Episcopal Church.
On the other hand, apart from the groups departing, given the relatively high average age of Episcopalians, a significant part of the decline is probably attrition - people dying off and not being replaced. Plus, of course, people leaving for non-ideological reasons unrelated to the current controversies.
Sorry… church stats are an addiction with me, sort of like a complex puzzle. To extrapolate meaning from them is almost impossible, except on the largest possible scale, and with many more qualifications than a news story could accomodate.
January 6, 2009, at 4:23 pm
Dear Douglas,
As a nefarious comma-splicer, please put away your blue pencil when you visit my blog, but feel free to continue your critiques of people who write for a living.
January 7, 2009, at 3:53 am
Douglas LeBlanc wrote:
If you’re just saying that The Nation has a political agenda not had by GetReligion, then sure enough. But are you going further, and saying that GetReligion has a worldview of its own? I mean, I recognize that the contributors are all Christians, but I didn’t think Christianity (or even theism) was a starting point for the blog.
January 7, 2009, at 6:52 am
Dave2,
I must have had this long-ago post by Terry in the back of my mind as I wrote my response.
January 7, 2009, at 9:28 am
Funny, I thought “getreligion” never wrote about partisan media, like The Nation or the National Review…
January 7, 2009, at 9:49 am
Sergio, my work with GetReligion includes coverage of magazines, and most magazines are, to some extent, opinion journals. I will not limit my scope only to magazines that publish few opinions.
GetReligion emphasizes critiques of reporting, and The Nation’s article was an example of attempted reporting.
January 8, 2009, at 12:41 am
GetReligion emphasizes critiques of reporting, and The Nation’s article was an example of attempted reporting.
I’d recast; you’re appropriating the definite article from the publication’s title for your own sentence.
That is:
” … the Los Angeles Times article was an example …”
but:
” …”the article in The New York Times was an example …”
You might be able to get by with:
” … and the Nation article was an example …”
January 8, 2009, at 6:39 am
Joy, I stand with the style of Columbia Journalism Review and The Atlantic, which capitalize the definite article when it is part of a publication’s name.
So, for instance:
National Review’s article
The Nation’s article
or
the National Review article
the Nation article
but not
the National Review’s article
the Nation’s article
I chose the first construction rather than the second because I found it more efficient.
January 27, 2009, at 3:56 pm
The Nation doesn’t strictly adhere to AP style. Different publications have different style guides. A lot of publications have their copy editors create a style that is unique to the publication.
January 27, 2009, at 3:59 pm
I understand that, Katherine. I would hope that, to the extent that a magazine’s style departs from AP, it is in the direction of greater accuracy, clarity and fairness, rather than in the opposite direction.
Most of my criticisms did not rely on AP style.