| | Jason,
Now that you are editing SoloHq's daily articles and The New Individualist is just getting started and TOC has high hopes for it, it's important to note that a print or online publication rises or falls with the editor. [Not that I want to put any pressure on you :-) ]
There are radically different kinds of editors:
1. All editors view it as their function to edit for presentation or "good English". To correct grammar, vocabulary, spelling, punctuation. Length and verboseness: shorten things, split up long-winded sentences (or ask the author to do both). That sort of thing, but to leave the rest of it alone.
2. Some view it as their function to edit for content as well as presentation. If you are editing the Intellectual Activist or Liberty or other libertarian or objectivist publication or website which has a definite ideology as opposed to a totally open forum, you will need to make sure the writers are either consistent with the philosophy of the publication (tighter editing) or at least on topic within the type of subject it addresses while differing in point of view (looser content editing).
3. Other editors view it as their function to edit for 'style'. I have worked with objectivist and libertarian editors who either wanted a 'house style' (for example, scholarly, non-emotional language when I wrote for an academic or ideological "journal") or who simply wanted writers to write in a style closer to that which the editor himself enjoyed, found better, or would prefer to read (a website I wrote for). An example of a successful intellectual publication which historically has -not- imposed the editor's style or a house style is "The New Yorker." It has had many different kinds of writers over the years who range from terse to loquacious, from biting and satirical to objective and calm, from highly descriptive observers of detail to free-wheeling and impressionistic to highly abstract and 'dense'.
Within the above three types, an editor can tend to be loose and allowing of a great deal of authorial latitude or tight and perfectionist (someone who edits and changes most sentences to get them exactly right in his view). Or somewhere in between. (I say "tend to be" because obviously it would depend on the piece. One can leave untouched an article by a great writer but have to completely overhaul something by someone who is clumsy and ungrammatical or wafts away on a tide of imprecise floating abstractions but has an important point to make.)
Which type are you?
By the way, since "The Objectivist" and the "Objectivist Newsletter" were, taken together, TBSMTAEW - The Best Small Magazine That Absolutely Ever Was, it might be enormously instructive if Barbara could tell us which type of editor Ayn Rand was. Style, content, presentation? And how "hands on" was she was in terms of changing everything, allowing the author to attempt to change first, etc.?
Phil
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