Editors Helped Me Improve My Writing

Teachers not so much

Welcome to Extra Muros, your home for writing that will encourage, inform, and facilitate your quest to educate yourself while remaining “beyond the walls” of our dying universities. If you like what you see, please bookmark, share, and subscribe.

When I attended school, teachers covered my papers with red ink, thereby committing many of the crimes, real and imagined, that they were condemning. Rather than writing complete sentences, let alone paragraphs, they scribbled cryptic phrases, filled margins with punctuation marks, and employed clichés like they were going out of style. When, however, I wrote for magazines, editors reviewing submissions limited themselves to one or two thoughtful comments, neatly presented in the form of a well-composed letter.

The difference between these two sorts of experience stemmed from disparities of intelligence, skill, confidence, and, most of all, purpose. While my editors were clever, self-assured people who invariably wrote well, my teachers had been weened on the weak tea of midwittery. Where the former took delight in his role of literary midwife, assisting at the birth of well-wrought piece of prose, the latter lacked the means to appreciate fresh perspectives, unfamiliar facts, or the music of well-chosen words. Where editors strove to bring out the best in my work, teachers took pains to enforce conformity to a set of arbitrary, and, in many cases, counter-productive rules.

In this age of self-publishing, a young writer enjoys fewer opportunities to work with the sort of editors who, three or four decades ago, helped me to improve my writing. That’s the bad news. At the same time, it has never been easier for writers to learn from, advise, and, most of all, encourage each other.