Bill Walsh Quotes

Copy editors are very important and too rarely praised.

Everybody needs an editor.

I don't know if I officially proofread my father's book, but I read it. I did get some conception of grammar in general from that.

Every book has mistakes in them, every one. There's never been a book published without mistakes.

And that's how I start myself. I usually go back a couple of pages, maybe to the beginning of the chapter, and I start reading. And as I'm reading, I'm tweaking - putting in a different word, changing the syntax, putting that clause over there, you know that sort of thing.

The life of an editor is not a glamorous one. You're a fixer; you make things better.

I used to work as a proofreader at Merrill Lynch.

In my experience, copy editors, like the stalwart staff I've worked with and learned from in my 34 years at 'TIME,' are linguistic conservatives - the keepers of the flame ignited by the Strunk-White 'Elements of Style,' published in full in 1957 and chosen by 'TIME' as one of the 100 most influential nonfiction books of the past century.

What helps change bad writing into mediocre writing is editing. Editing is in bad shape in print journalism, and is in virtually nonexistent shape in online journalism.

I'd rather fiddle with my phone for precious seconds than neglect an apostrophe; I'd rather insert a word laboriously keyed out than resort to predictive texting for a - acceptable to some - synonym.

To write you have to be able to know how to put words together.

I'm pretty rigorous about the drafts I turn in. I don't turn in something that's so ungodly they go, 'What the hell is this?'

I know I have a problem with semi-colon abuse and have written page-long sentences. Nobody needs to be reading page-long sentences, at least not written by me.

My self-editing process is intense.

After my husband spell-checks one of my manuscripts, my editor says, 'It's been Normanized.'

A good editor understands what you're talking and writing about and doesn't meddle too much.

Editing is simply the application of the common sense of any good reader. That's why, to be an editor, you have to be a reader. It's the number one qualification.

I think in any writing you're paying attention to detail.

I'm a writer first and an editor second... or maybe third or even fourth. Successful editing requires a very specific set of skills, and I don't claim to have all of them at my command.

Careful writing is important for many reasons, not least that intelligent but hurried reporters will trust the presser, resulting in a cascade of secondary damage.

If any sort of error is inexcusable, it's an incorrect phone number. One of the cardinal rules of copy editing is that every phone number published must be checked.

Like all editors, I assume, I'm a reactor.

I'm a language-oriented writer who proceeds sentence by sentence.

Editing is the same as quarrelling with writers - same thing exactly.

I spent the entire morning inserting a comma; I spent the whole afternoon removing it again.