Brian Patrick Eha at The Hedgehog Review:
Joan Didion could hardly stand It. More than once, It made Robert Caro wrathful, yelling down the telephone line: because periods had been softened into semicolons, semicolons diminished into commas. Gay Talese, when he was a New York Times reporter, if he thought himself ill-used by It, would call the copy desk and demand that his byline be struck from the offending piece before it could run in the paper’s afternoon edition. John McPhee, dealing with a philistine who dared apply a Procrustean rule to the juicy forty-thousand-word piece on oranges he had blithely filed as his third-ever contribution to The New Yorker, sectioning off…
Brian Patrick Eha at The Hedgehog Review:
Joan Didion could hardly stand It. More than once, It made Robert Caro wrathful, yelling down the telephone line: because periods had been softened into semicolons, semicolons diminished into commas. Gay Talese, when he was a New York Times reporter, if he thought himself ill-used by It, would call the copy desk and demand that his byline be struck from the offending piece before it could run in the paper’s afternoon edition. John McPhee, dealing with a philistine who dared apply a Procrustean rule to the juicy forty-thousand-word piece on oranges he had blithely filed as his third-ever contribution to The New Yorker, sectioning off 85 percent of the story, fought for five days running to restore as much as possible of his manuscript—enough, in the end, to make a serial feature published in two sequential issues.1 A bane of the top talents and best minds, shortening by God knows how many lost hours their productive working lives—this is what *It *is and does.
By now, you have surely guessed what It is. I refer of course to editing.
more here.
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