The love of plaintalk vs. hated editorspeak

God made copy editors. So love-hate relationships would agitate newsrooms.
Desk hounds can save your butt. They also can make you and your reader question the whole enterprise of journalism.
When I sat on a copy desk, naturally, we could do no wrong. Then I moved to reporting. I learned to insert a small error in everything I wrote. That way a copy editor could triumph over the “find” and move on instead of repeatedly reworking my story in agonizing self-justification.
“An Elegy for Copy Editors” on the editorial page of The New York Times reminds me of past ways and of the future of journalism. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/16/opinion/16mon4.html?ex=1371355200&en=4871a499fb7ba4b7&ei=5124&partner=permalink&exprod=permalink
The elegist Lawrence Downes had visited the Newseum, our industry’s shrine to itself in Washington. He searched in vain for a niche of tribute to copy editors. The death rattle of the copy desk foreshadows the obituary for print journalism.
Machines and those who operate them without time to get form and content completely right are lapping the bypassed word-checkers many times over in the relay race that is news delivery. The self-correcting blogosphere doesn’t seem to mind that much about accuracy.
The NYT elegy laments the decline of newspapers and of readers. Budget cuts lop the heads off the copy editing headline writers. Those guardians of credibility in word use and fact and meaning and readability no longer provide quality control. So publishing declines more, costing it more readers in the industry’s downward spiral.
Newspapers are shrinking or eliminating “multiply redundant levels of editing that distinguish their kind of journalism,” the elegy recounts. Layers of editing no doubt applied themselves to that very article for publication on the editorial page of The Times.
Yet what a weak sentence!
The word “redundant” doesn’t need or want the modifier “multiply,” as if to say, “redundantly redundant.”
The eye stops and stares at “multiply.” Does he mean the verb “to increase?” Or does the writer mean the opposite of “singly?”
See. I told you I used to be a copy editor.
Elegiac language is not the way people speak, a goal of the popular press in every era when volume matters.
The ambiguity actually proves the thesis in The Times where a copy editor should have prevented the reader from pausing in mid-sentence. Too many pauses produce too few readers.
But the passage also reveals too much deference to editors with their arcane ways and too little attention to readers with other ways to get information.
Even bloggers know to use plainspeak.
Print writers and their copy editors violate the Hippocratic Oath by first doing harm when they make the language more austere and not more readable.
Let’s not lament old ways too much while we improve ways to communicate.
Meanwhile you may take for granted any error you read here is inserted intentionally just to see if you could catch it.