Re: Off topic: educational methods

[Bill Troop billtroop@xxxxxxxx]

> Perhaps asking what problems they have with writers might
> start a discussion, which you could then guide to the matter
> at hand.
Isn't one of the problems that there was a kind of golden age of editorship
in America between let us say roughly 1920 and 1980 -- the like of which
had never been seen before -- that is simply over with now?
I have a friend who's working on a biography now who has had a six-figure
advance, but he doesn't have an editor to work with. And he really needs
one. Or consider such a monumental project as Royall Tyler's new
translation of Genji -- which desperately needed a hard-nosed editor and
apparently didn't have one. Where are the great editors? I know a great
editor -- Jerry Gross -- who compiled a beautiful book, years ago ("Editors
on Editing" I think) -- who was terribly depressed about the field the last
time I talked with him, which was already a few years ago.
In computer journalism, which I still dabble in, I haven't worked with an
editor who actually changes what I write since 1997! I was shocked, in
college, to discover that in Italy, there aren't any editors at all! They
just publish what you write!
Oh well. I would be happy with something simple, like never having to see
an apostrophe with no s following it in the New York Post, or never again
having to see the contraction 'who've' in the New York Times. Some things
do change for the better. Has anyone noticed that 'hopefully' is on the wane?
Isn't one of the problems that there is now so much respect for the
vernacular? That it is no longer considered desirable to be correct? By way
of a very weak example, I offer this: that the Royal Shakespeare Company in
England is no longer permitted to teach stage English, as it is considered
to be unnecessarily brutal to its foul-speaking students. It's not just
that 'posh' is out; it's that any reasonable standard of correctness in
writing or speech is simply no longer respected. Recently, I heard an audio
clip of the late Mayor John Lindsay speaking. That kind of exquisite
American diction is simply unknown in public life today; nobody even
aspires to it.
Mais je divague! It must be war nerves! I hereby still my tongue for the
next several months!