#editing

#editing

"Editing is as much about knowing and growing your team as it is about elevating their copy," said Kathleen McGrory, an editor with The New York Times Local Investigations Fellowship. "As an editor, a key part of your job is understanding what makes your reporters tick and helping them reach their goals beyond any one story. It requires open communication, deep trust and really listening."

Here's the good news: writing isn't a talent. It's a skill. And skills respond to the same cure as every other skill: reps. Not glamorous reps. Not the kind that gets applause. The kind you do in small rooms, when no one is watching, when you're a little uncomfortable, when you want to quit halfway through because the sentence you just wrote feels like wet cardboard. That's the work.

I did see what he meant and, glancing over the letter again and seeing things like I realise that my application is bound to be something of a long shot I experienced successive waves of emotion. First, shame at my crassness; second, gratefulness to my friend for having vouchsafed to me the magic word the key, no doubt, to his own elegance in English. The word was cut.

For a while now, we've been seeing companies that fired a bunch of their human workers in favor of artificial intelligence move to recoup some of that flesh-and-blood labor. Now, that push has resulted in a new line of gig work: slop fixer-uppers, who get paid to improve AI-generated art, writing, and code - by making it less, well, sloppy.

Dean DeBlois emphasized the importance of editing, stating, "Everything's sort of long-winded at first, and then you squeeze and you squeeze, and it eventually starts to paint targets on areas of the movie where you really feel the breaks being hit."

You're kind of spinning plates. You planted all these seeds in the earlier episodes and now you're paying them off.

"I feel like I'm numb to a lot of stuff at this point... If it doesn't stand out I don't see it."

Tyler has written for The Atlantic since 2023; before joining the magazine on staff, he was an associate professor at Bates College.