Editing is editing is editing—for the most part.
If you survived ninth grade English, you already have the core skills you’ll need to be a successful Bleacher Report editor. There are, however, a handful of unique challenges posed by online, open-source editing work. The methodology and philosophy laid out in this brief primer are designed to help you meet them—and to help you make Bleacher Report the best network it can possibly be.
Methodology
Online, open-source editing is an inexact science. There’s no magic-bullet methodology that can turn a bad article into a good one.
That said, the best Bleacher Report articles generally exhibit three fundamental qualities: Concision, Clarity, and Centeredness. As an editor, it’s got to be your goal to cultivate each of them in the pieces you revise.
Concision
Brevity is the soul of wit, especially on the Internet. Given the short attention spans of online readers, it’s important that Bleacher Report articles be as concise as possible.
In a practical sense, this means it’s your job as an editor to eliminate excess verbiage. If a phrase is redundant, cut it. If a sentence is wordy, shorten it. If a piece is bloated, it’s your job to trim the fat.
As a general rule, always delete before you add to an article—this ensures that the piece retains the author’s original voice while making it more readable for Internet audiences. Also take care to break long sentences and paragraphs into shorter ones wherever possible.
Clarity
It’s the Golden Rule of writing: Say what you mean.
As a Bleacher Report editor, you should defer to an author’s own rhetoric as much as possible. Still, there will be instances in which you have to delete or modify phrases in order to illuminate the author’s argument.
In doing so, it’s important to be faithful to the author’s original point. You might not agree with it—you might think it’s the stupidest thing you’ve ever heard—but yours is not to judge. Clarity means clarity on the author’s own terms; nothing more and nothing less.
Think of it like this: Bleacher Report writers provide the knife. It’s your job to sharpen the edge—regardless of where the blade is targeted.
Centeredness
A Bleacher Report article can (and should) be “centered” in two distinct senses: rhetorically and spatially.
Rhetorical centeredness speaks for itself. A piece should have a coherent overall structure, with an attention-grabbing introduction and a point-making conclusion. Tangents are okay in small doses, but your job as an editor is to keep a piece progressing at a steady pace. This is delicate work, obviously. The only way to master the craft is to practice it.
As for “spatial” centeredness: It’s important to maintain visual and structural balance in the text. Most pointedly, this means (a) breaking long paragraphs into shorter ones and (b) creating single-sentence “anchor” paragraphs where appropriate.
If a sentence makes a particularly important point within the article (or can be modified to do so), set it off as its own paragraph. This strategy makes a piece more readable by making its argument easier to follow.
Remember, most Internet readers read very quickly. To catch and hold their attention, it’s important to create visual and rhetorical breaks (e.g. paragraph breaks and single-sentence anchor paragraphs) within the course of the text.
Like this.
Every article has its own “mass,” composed both of its rhetorical substance and its literal appearance on the page. Readers engage most readily with texts whose mass is appropriately centered. As an editor, it’s your job to balance the weight.
Philosophy
As an editor of open-source content, HOW you do your work is as important as the quality of the work itself.
Remember, Bleacher Report writers have the ability to overrule edits whenever they wish—which means you have to “sell” your revisions to an author. More broadly, Bleacher Report is first and foremost a community of collaborators, and you should use your editing work to build relationships with other writers on the network.
Generally speaking, a little effort can go a long way here. Three core principles—Attention to Detail, Positive Reinforcement, and Humble Dialogue—are especially relevant.
Attention to Detail
The best editors are typically the most anal ones. On the one hand, that’s why the best editors typically have the most stunted social lives. On the other, that’s why the best editors produce the most polished work.
There’s no better way to alienate an author than by running his work with a glaring typo in it. When editing a piece, you should proofread it no less than twice. Also be sure to pay special attention to formatting issues, and to the specific guidelines laid out in the Bleacher Report Style Guide. Em-dashes and percent symbols might seem unimportant, but it’s the little things that ultimately determine the quality of a reader’s Bleacher Report experience.
The bottom line: Get it right. Be perfect. It’s impossible, of course—but it’s the sort of mindset that will make Bleacher Report the best sports network on the Internet.
Positive Reinforcement
If you’re a writer, you know the truth: We’re all prima donnas. We need our egos stroked, our psyches soothed. If you tell us how great we are, we’ll love you forever...and we’ll be more inclined to embrace any revisions you make to our articles.
The rub here is that edits are always best swallowed with a dose of praise. When you contact an author to tell him you’ve revised his work, don’t forget to mention how much you enjoyed it. Beyond making it more likely that he’ll accept your changes, that sort of positive reinforcement will go a long way towards building a loyal Bleacher Report writer base.
Humble Dialogue
The best editor—the best Bleacher Report editor, anyway—is the one who knows the author is always right.
Even when he isn’t.
In an open-source environment, it’s inevitable that some writers will choose to overrule your edits—and it’s a good bet that the overruling will diminish the quality of their pieces. Oh well. Remember, individual articles are less important than the overall vibrancy of the Bleacher Report community. A significant part of that vibrancy, in turn, is grounded in the final authority Bleacher Report writers have over their own work. If that authority is sometimes used to grammatically-awkward ends...so be it.
When push comes to shove, the best you can do is offer guidance, not impose your will from on high. The more patience and humility you bring to the job, the better off everyone will be.
The Big Picture
From a content standpoint, your goal as a Bleacher Report editor is to ensure quality at every turn. From an interpersonal perspective, it’s to build trust wherever you can.
And to make Bleacher Report work, you’ve got to serve both masters in everything you do.
Again, the success of Bleacher Report is and will continue to be contingent both on the quality of its content and the coherency of its community. We can’t afford to sacrifice one in favor of the other...and so it is that our editorial work, in the end, amounts to more of a delicate balancing act than anything else.
It’s no mean feat, of course, but it will be well worth the effort if we can do it right.
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Other resources in Bleacher Report's online Editor's Library:
- • Editing Tutorial
- • Editor's Cheat Sheet
- • Editing Case Study
- • Bleacher Report Style Guide
- • Star-Rating Guide
