Page 96 - Student: dazed And Confused

I digress. When I met with my editing partner, we shared our thoughts about the
work to be done and, luckily, most of them meshed. I picked up on some things she missed
and vice versa. It was good to work together because you may have conflicting ideas on
what does and doesn't work. When we had agreed on the proposed changes, we called in
the authors of each piece one by one. On the whole, they were quite agreeable to most of
the minor changes. There was no problem with these tiny errors which we dismissed mostly
as their brains working faster than their computers. Some of the writers had noticed small
errors and pointed them out.
We did run across a problem with them when we found that they had been written
in a certain format for reasons we had no way of knowing during editing.

Lemonade
This writer wanted to keep two or three stanzas where we thought they should just be
scrapped as they were saying the same thing in different ways. It had been agreed by
majority vote a while before that the group would respect the author, and let their decision
be final. Nothing was said about persuasion. Feeling so strongly that these stanzas seemed
somewhat redundant (and I still stand by that) we decided to show the writer how it would
look so much better, and sound punchier, without it. She dug her heels in and insisted that
she wanted them in because it was very personal and important. That changed things a

little and we eventually came to a compromise where those sections were left in but shoved
together to create one slightly longer verse. It made the writer happier to know that it was
not going to be cut, and we as editors felt that it had been a success in negotiating.

Christmas lights: Haughton
Our first question for this writer was whether Haughton was a real place. I don't think it
would have affected the editing - we just wanted to make sure the poem had come from
something real and not just a flash of inspiration. It is a real place incidentally. We then
asked about the wording, in particular 'kerbcrawlers.' My partner thought it sent out the
wrong connotations of men trawling the streets for a moment's fun. I can see where she

was coming from because it makes it sleazy, but I thought the writer meant to send that
message out as it seems a carefully though out word. The writer had wanted it so I was
quite pleased that I'd understood. The punctuation was more or less right, and a couple of
words were pluralized where it sounded better if it were singular. We had noticed a bit of a
problem at the end where the idea of Christmas returns to simplicity and being Biblical. The
writer had slowed things down by playing around with the spacing of the final few lines. We
thought it worked better if the lines were cut into four short lines and the fourth stood
alone. The author saw that it still slowed it down further and agreed that we should change
it.

Garden of tranquillity