Why edit on the screen? Advantages of onscreen editing

(This Web page was originally Chapter 2 of Effective Onscreen Editing, but I've moved it online because most people now understand the advantages of onscreen editing. I've nonetheless retained this information for historical reasons and in case you need to persuade someone of the merits of onscreen editing.)

Given that on-paper editing has worked perfectly well for centuries, why waste time "fixing what works" by moving editing onto the computer? Largely because on-paper editing doesn't work particularly well; like the dog that sings opera, it's amazing that it sings at all, and not surprising that it sings badly. Software greatly facilitates and improves most traditional editorial tasks; that is, it increases both the speed and the quality of editing (i.e., its efficiency). Moreover, given that most manuscripts are now created on the computer, printing them out just so they can be edited is both inefficient and ecologically questionable. But the efficiency argument proves most persuasive to authors, editors, and managers whomust produce superior manuscripts under tight deadlines and budgets. This increasingly includes everyone who earns a living working with words.

So if the main reason to adopt onscreen editing is efficiency, what efficiency advantages does it offer?

Minimize errors incorporating edits

When someone must retype handwritten edits, they inevitably miss some. A rough, unscientific estimate based on personal experience suggests that even skilled secretaries miss or misinterpret up to 5% of handwritten corrections. Authors who aren't professional writers—the majority of some editors' clientele—are even less accurate. In addition, typists routinely introduce new errors into manuscripts when they misread an editor's poor handwriting (one of my particular sins) or mistype a correction.

Onscreen editing eliminates many of these problems: the edits are already in the file, and so long as we carefully review our work before sending it to the author, those edits should contain no typos. The automation provided by a word processor's revision tools also helps ensure that the person who incorporates the corrections into the final manuscript won't miss any edits.

Of course, we can still err by dealing incorrectly with a given edit; for example, I've seen authors skip a correction by accidentally clicking the Find Next button to find the next edit before approving or rejecting the current edit, accept edits that should be rejected by clicking the Reject button, or reject edits that should be accepted by clicking the Accept button.

Variants of these problems also occur with on-paper edits, so whether you edit on the screen or on paper, it's still necessary to perform quality control on the results.

Reduce correction time

With on-paper editing, the best-case scenario is that the person responsible for entering the corrections into the word processor file carefully reviews their own work to catch any corrections that they missed during the first pass and fixes any errors they introduced while making those corrections. Unfortunately, busy workers often skip this step, since it can double the time required to incorporate all the corrections. Even if this extra step were not necessary, retyping handwritten corrections into the original word processor document increases turnaround time. In effect, the edits must be "written" twice (once on paper and again in the word processor) and checked at least once.

With onscreen editing, all corrections are already present in the manuscript, and this eliminates the time required to transfer them from paper to computer. Because this also eliminates transcription errors, there's no need to fix this category of error in a subsequent review stage. There's also a small but important benefit in terms of clarity: typed edits are easier to read and understand than handwritten ones, and less likely to be misinterpreted.

Because most of us can type faster than we can write by hand, we can also provide longer and clearer comments in less time. It's also likely that we can type the edits (enter them into the manuscript) faster than the authors who would otherwise have to do this. (Dedicated typing pools staffed by experienced typists who do the corrections for authors are generally a thing of the past.)

Edit faster and more consistently

On-paper editing relies on slow, inefficient handwritten comments. Even for those rare but annoying editors who always get their edits right the first time, with no need for revision, it's frustrating and time-consuming to repeatedly write the same comment by hand, perhaps dozens of times even in a short manuscript. Moreover, even the best editors have difficulty finding every instance of a problematic word or phrase on paper; a problem that becomes apparent several hundred pages into an edit (e.g., a word that has been used incorrectly) requires us to re-read the entire manuscript seeking out all instances of that problem—a tedious, slow, and error-prone process. In onscreen editing, the word processor's search function can quickly find each of these instances.

Onscreen editing solves these problems in several ways. For example, as I noted earlier, most of us learn to type edits faster with the keyboard than we could write them with pen or pencil. This is particularly true for edits that involve extensive rewriting, which require considerable juggling of words and phrases before attaining a satisfactory result; on a computer, an entire chunk of problematic text can be copied and pasted in a few keystrokes, then revised quickly by inserting new words, deleting old ones, and shuffling around the rest of the words until we're satisfied. The results are also easier for authors to read, understand, and review, since there's no sticky correction fluid* or pools of glistening red ink covering the errors made en route to finding a solution.

* For the youngsters in the audience: Back in the days when dinosaurs ruled the Earth, and editors were the furry and furtive primitive mammals that authors sometimes accuse us of still being, manuscripts were typed using crude devices known as "typewriters". The main advantage of these devices was that they were heavy, and could be used to bludgeon authors into submission when logic failed. The IBM Selectric, beloved of many editors, weighed in at nearly 40 pounds, and was so rugged that used models often formed the walls of military-grade blast shelters. (This was back in the era of the Cold War, when surviving until a manuscript was published became an important editorial concern.) When a keen-eyed (albeit furry and furtive) editor spotted a typo or other problem, they reached into their lizard-skin pouch and removed what was essentially a gourd of white paint, which they slathered over the offending text, concealing it from the horrified eyes of onlookers. When this correction fluid dried—if it ever did—it became possible to type a correction over the paint.

Word processors also let us automate repetitive, tedious work. For example, we can now insert a standard comment such as "this reference is missing from your bibliography" with a few keystrokes rather than manually typing the same comment dozens of times per manuscript. (My personal record is close to twenty repetitions of a single comment in a short manuscript.) Similarly, it's far faster to replace all instances of an incorrectly used term with the correct term in a single step, using a global search and replace operation, than it is to hunt down each occurrence of the term and make the change manually. If only some occurrences of the term are likely to be incorrect, you can't perform a global search and replace, but you can still use the search tool to quickly and easily find all occurrences of the problematic wording.

But some things remain the same

None of these advantages minimizes the editor's role in the editing process: providing human insight into communication problems and applying human experience to solve those problems. Onscreen editing is one of the surprisingly few areas in which the promise of the computer revolution (freeing humans to perform creative intellectual work) has actually been fulfilled. Once we understand how to edit on the screen, we can combine the advantages offered by computerization (potentially flawless execution of simple, repetitive tasks) with the unparalleled strengths of the human mind (performing complex semantic analyses and determining how to solve problems). Learning to edit on the screen can potentially make us better editors, free us from the drudgery of many traditional editorial tasks, and let us concentrate on the best way to clarify and communicate the author's message.

None of these benefits force us to work exclusively on the screen. For example, it's possible to use the search tools to find each occurrence of a word in the word processor file, then manually indicate the problems on a printed copy if that works better for you. The key is to use the computer for what it does well: supporting our work. Each of us will find different ways to do that, using the tools and techniques described in Effective Onscreen Editing.