Oi, Dr Mumbo! Leave Australia’s deleted subs alone
Whatever happened to Australia’s newspaper and magazine sub-editors? And do they now have a future? Mumbrella’s Adam Thorn takes a look back at the once highly respected profession.
Essential English, by former Sunday Times editor Harold Evans, is both an instruction manual and love letter to the art of subbing.
Now long since forgotten by journalists and those who teach them, it was regarded as the authority on news writing upon its first release in 1972. You can imagine seething chief subs hurling it across smoky newsrooms at reporters upon discovering, say, that “management” was referred to as “leadership team” or that somebody was “time poor” rather than “busy”.
Essential English, by Harold Evans, was first released in 1972 before being revised at the turn of the century. This is my battered old copy, which I first read 15 years ago
The sad reality is that newspapers have discovered that most people don’t recognise/care about a few typos, and can’t distinguish great writing from mediocre.
You only have to look at people’s writing on social media, and the statistics on literacy levels across Australia, to realise this.
For those of us with “high” literacy it’s of course irksome to see some of the errors that result, but we’re not enough to pay the bills.
The only place that subs are really needed, from a commercial point of view, is with articles/headlines that may be legally contentious.
Beautiful piece. Thanks.
Yes, brilliant book.
I’ve quoted that Hemingway line many times. But I got it wrong, and have been quoting a 15 times’ last page rewrite.
The idea that, just as an engine doesn’t have an unnecessary part, so a sentence should not have a superfluous word.
I lent Evan’s book to a former girlfriend. She now writes better than she returns items borrowed.
($50 to anybody who can find an unnecessary word in the above.)
”The idea that” should have been cut.
What are you going to do with the $50 Alan?
Evans’ book
The idea that, just as an engine doesn’t have an unnecessary part, so a sentence should not have a superfluous word.
Replace with, ‘An engine doesn’t have an unnecessary part. A sentence doesn’t need a superfluous word either.
($50 to anybody who can find an unnecessary word in the above.)
Replace with, ‘($50 if you find an unnecessary word above.)’
We weep and read The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and The London Review of Books to stop weeping. We read well-written and well-edited fiction. We even write and edit it. But the days of Hemigwayesque payment for fiction and journalism died a long time ago.
Well said. What especially galled me about Mumbrella’s cheap dig was that it’s hardly a bastion of subbing excellence itself. How many subs do you have Mumbrella? And how long after you started did you hire your first one?
Good article Adam. But you must watch your tenses. And most of those “thats” can go, too.
I suspect the lack of respect has something to do with the rather common and obvious error that the author of the headline has not read the article. This is pretty commonplace now. My guess is its a simple lack of staffing but I am not in a position to know. Yet another one of the reasons newspapers are dying.
“doubtlessly”? I think not – Ed