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Create or Correct?
Perhaps nowadays, in some blank corners of the civilized world, young women and men actually graduate high school, and later college, with dreams of becoming editors. If I saw them in my waking life, I would be wont to whisper that their parents were probably editors—both of them—or that they had at some time, somehow mistaken The Chicago Manual of Style for the Bible and William Strunk Jr. for God. If these dreamers do exist, they do so despite any inspiration from the movies; there was probably no mention of editing at Career Day; and a booth at the job fair is unthinkable. They would know only what I knew then—what most people think—editors don’t create, they correct. This is not the stuff of dreams. Such ignorance served me well, though, when I began working as a math editor for an education publisher. I thrived on errors in a language of rights and wrongs. "Correct-ness" was the ultimate goal, and if you didn’t like it, well sorry, "that’s my job." I knew only that, as an editor, I was to look for mistakes between every letter, inside every comma, and if I didn’t find them, I would look again and again and then again until they came out. When I could not attack spelling errors or grammar problems, I turned an eye to the math for weaknesses. Marks turned into memos, which turned into paragraphs, which turned into pages and even mini-theories about the importance of language in shaping our ideas about mathematics. I argued, for instance, that sentences such as "Sally’s garden is a rectangle" are mathematically incorrect and damaging to students’ learning. Rectangles and other polygons, I wrote, are not objects, they are concepts, and their mathematical properties are derived solely from this intangibility. Sally most certainly does not have a rectangle in her backyard; she has a "rectangular garden." They listened, luckily. So with the help of a false start—a blind, almost religious, mandate to seek out the tiniest of errors and destroy them—I had unknowingly turned a corrective role into a creative one. A glance at a handful of biographies of authors or writers in any genre nearly always reveals the same thing—at one time these people were editors. Their dedication to precision is an education in creativity. They endlessly question, examine, rethink, reword, step back, rephrase, and rewrite in the pursuit of correctness and direction, and in so doing, acquire an ever-greater appreciation for a language that many others take for granted. As much, then, as editors are merely aspiring writers, writers are merely accomplished editors. However we choose to define creativity—a word admittedly filled with many connotations—it should be done with an editor’s care and precision. From the first sentence in Kafka’s Metamorphosis to a definition in a math textbook, creativity is a function of accuracy, not an enemy to it. We may not dream about accuracy, correctness, precision, or direction, but no dream is without them. J.D. Fisher is a senior editor for American Book Publishing. © 2005 American Book Publishing™ *All other trademarks used by permission. All rights reserved. Privacy Policy and Trademark Use Policy.
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