Miscellaneous

If you?ve ever bristled at editors who mangled your draft, then you have some famous company: Thomas Jefferson. In America?s Founding Editors, University of Missouri law professor Douglas E. Abrams tells the story of how a group of 65 editors?the entire Continental Congress?worked over Jefferson?s draft of the Declaration of Independence, line by line. The process and its result left Jefferson resentful for years.

But here?s the punch line: This editing by a 65-member editorial committee actually improved the document! The editors tightened many passages and deleted others; the result of their efforts was a tighter, stronger document. Professor Abrams cites Pauline Maier?s description of their work:

Pauline Maier calls Congress? close scrutiny of Jefferson?s draft ?an act of group editing that has to be one of the great marvels of history.? ?This was no hack editing job,? she continues, because ?the delegates who labored over the draft Declaration had a splendid ear for language. . . . By exercising their intelligence, political good sense, and a discerning sense of language, the delegates managed to make the Declaration at once more accurate and more consonant with the convictions of their constituents, and to enhance both its power and its eloquence.?

Somehow I cannot imagine a contemporary 65-member congressional committee accomplishing such a feat. Nevertheless, there?s a lesson here for us writers who, proud as we may be of our own prose, are no Jeffersons. Those editors who we think are mangling our work might be improving it.

(A tip of the tricorne to Legal History Blog.)