One of the first things they tell new copy editors is not to mess with a writer’s voice.
Go ahead and check the facts, question the story’s fairness and fix the grammar, but never, ever flatten out a reporter’s unique writing style until it all but disappears.
Word choice, sentence structure, tone and use of punctuation are certainly part of the writer’s voice, but it’s also influenced by the subtle way a story is presented.
It might be hard to imagine how a story about clubroot can contain the writer’s voice, but rest assured, it’s in there.
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Long-time Western Producer readers should try this some time — read a story without looking at the byline and see if you can tell who the writer is just from the way the story is written.
I’ve been editing stories at The Western Producer for a long time, and learning how to be a no-nonsense and sometimes ruthless editor without snuffing out the writer’s unique voice was an important step in my development as a copy editor.
I was reminded of this recently while listening to a friend talk about how much work goes into writing his family’s annual Christmas letter.
This year, when he was telling his adult children about his week-long labour of love, one of his sons pulled out his phone and asked his Dad for the major themes on which he had built the letter.
My friend offered up the information, and his son typed it into a computer program. Two minutes later, a perfectly respectable Christmas letter had been produced, seemingly out of thin air. It appears that the family consensus was that the computer-generated letter was no worse than what my friend had written.
It might be tempting to think that computer programs like this could eventually put people like me out of business, but I disagree.
For one thing, reporters collect facts from sources and then craft them into an easily understood newspaper story, using years of experience to put the issues into context. I’m not sure how a computer program would accomplish that.
But equally important, I would argue, is that the writer’s voice would be replaced by a digital voice, and no one really wants that, do they?
