Cultivating naïveté

An editor has a challenge. They must know everything about writing and, essentially, nothing about anything else.

The power of remaining naïve

Of course, I’m exaggerating. Editors tend to know a little bit about a lot of things, because they have to read so many things in detail. And editors in a specific genre need to have broad general knowledge in that genre. Editors of medical writing need to know about medicine; editors of business writing need to know about business.

But the editor needs to understand how the reader will react to a piece. That demands putting aside or forgetting what you know about a topic and reviewing it with an attitude of, “How would a naïve reader react to this?” As an editor you must be alert for assumptions about the reader’s knowledge (“Of course, everyone reading this will be familiar with Foucault’s work” or “Everyone knows about Bayesian statistics.”) Even if the writer does expect all of their readers to have this knowledge, it’s worth raising the question. That’s far preferable to the opposite error, in which the writer and editor agree that the piece can assume all readers have a collection of knowledge, even though many of those readers will be bamboozled by tacit assumptions in the text.

That doesn’t mean editors should be stupid

Despite naïveté on content, editors should have great sophistication on writing. That includes expertise on:

• Ideas and how they are best expressed
• Interplay between stories, evidence, and argumentation
• How best to tell stories about people and situations
• How to identify and fix inconsistencies
• How to identify and fix repetition and redundancy
• Logic
• Presentation of statistical evidence
• Grammar rules
• The psychology of writing and creativity
• How to maintain the power and confidence of writers while incisively critiquing their work
• How collaboration in writing works

The list goes on and on — heck, I wrote a book about it. In fact, one of the joys of being an editor is discovering that each writer has found yet another way to write things wrong, or at least in a way that could be improved. (Half of my blog posts about writing are about new realizations I had after reading or discussing a piece with a writer — which is why editing is endlessly fascinating.)

Iteration destroys naïveté, so limit your editorial passes

When I review a second or third draft of a piece of content, I always start with a clean piece of text. I’m not interested in seeing my own or others’ comments on previous drafts. This is because I’m reviewing the text as a naïve reader, not checking if the author fixed something I complained about before.

I forget things. I often forget the comments I made in the previous draft, especially if it was weeks earlier. This ignorance is an asset: it allows me to come back to the draft fresh. If necessary, I can go back and check the previous edit to see if I found the same problems on the previous draft.

But there are limits. I can take a naïve view of the first draft, imagining that I’m a reader encountering the topic for the first time. I can forget what I read and once again take a naïve view on the second draft, and even on the third draft if it is supposed to be close to final.

But if I’m reviewing the fourth or fifth or tenth draft, the naïveté is out the window. I’ve read this so many times that I can’t even concentrate on the words; my brain knows or remembers what is there so I tend to skip over it. I have to work much harder and even so, my edits are less effective.

I’m sure this is true of most editors.

So if you’re asking an editor to review multiple drafts, keep in mind that we’re not machines. If you only have three drafts of useful review, what do you want them to accomplish? Discuss this with your editor and you’ll get better results.

And don’t be mad at your editor for being ignorant, because it’s part of the job.