Caroline Schweiter
I was the kind of kid who corrected other kids’ grammar. (People ask me, “Who says, ‘It was I?’” My family! We say, “It was I!”) In the early grades, I wanted to be either a writer or a general, but when I found out there was such a thing as an editor, I figured I’d split the difference.
After college, I enrolled in the Radcliffe Publishing Course (“an intensive six-week seminar teaching professional book and magazine publishing procedures,” as they told us to put on our résumés). When Barbara Wallraff, the copy chief for the Atlantic, came to give the RPC students her talk (it involved, among other things, the dispute over the spelling of “Hapsburg”/“Habsburg”), I cornered her like the fangirl I was. It was from her that I learned that a good editor doesn’t need to know everything but does need to know where to look everything up. (This was pre-internet, but the advice stands.)
Upon moving to Washington, D.C., I embarked on what was then a typical career path. I edited financial newsletters, alongside a veteran colleague who made wonderful jokes about “true facts” and Pittsburghers’ speech patterns. I worked for two different scholarly publishers—one a journal factory, the other an artisan shop where the nonacademic authors of my single publication required and accepted complete rewrites. I spent better than a year as a full-time freelancer. Along the way I mastered the style manuals of the AP and the APA (American Psychological Association), several other academic fields, and, of course, the University of Chicago Press.
My most memorable job was at the alternative weekly Washington City Paper, where as managing editor I was responsible for quality control on the entire newspaper, both news and arts sections. I also assigned and edited book, theater, and restaurant reviews. On my watch, a theater critic and the restaurant critic won the George Jean Nathan Award and a James Beard Award, respectively. In addition, I shepherded many 4,000- to 10,000-word cover stories, whose topics ranged from the business of competitive running to Gilded Age grave robbing, from idea all the way through to publication.
It was at the City Paper, which took as part of its mission the education of inexperienced writers, that I became practiced in building the kind of editing relationships that are most rewarding for both authors and editors: those based on mutual trust and respect. I was often a more skilled writer than the youngsters I worked with, but I didn’t have their daring or drive. I was often not as glib as the critics, but I had the grounding and the common touch to help their pieces become accessible. (The paper was aspirational—at that time, reading it served as a shibboleth for a certain class of city dweller—but it wasn’t meant to be incomprehensible.) Many of my former colleagues remain my friends years later.
Nowadays I am a freelancer again, editing everything from think tank reports to books on fashion. Almost without exception I enjoy every assignment; there’s always something to learn. I study maps of Syria, I look up designers’ names, I learn about landscape architecture, whatever. I tailor my efforts to suit my clients’ needs. I take great pleasure in helping writers make their points as elegantly and economically as possible. Some part of editing is always saving authors from embarrassment, which is an agreeable experience. An even better experience is allowing authors to find their most eloquent language, their most persuasive argument.
Just for fun, I used to run a Facebook page, Why You’re Wrong, on which I explicated interesting problems having to do with syntax and word choice. I tried not to let it become a grammar-gotcha site, though I did sometimes excoriate organizations that couldn’t be bothered with editors. I like to think my choices showed a little bit of personality, along with some of my skill.