The New Yorker is famous for its stringent copy-editing standards. Mary Norris, who has been at The New Yorker since 1978 and has served as a copy editor, proofreader, and writer, is the author of Between You & Me: Confessions of a Comma Queen and Greek to Me: Adventures of the Comma Queen.
“There is no denying that attention to detail is an asset in a copy editor,” said Norris in a 2015 interview with Literary Ashland. In Between You & Me, Norris describes other qualities that make good copy editors:
One of the things I like about my job is that it draws on the entire person: not just your knowledge of grammar and punctuation and usage and foreign languages and literature but also your experience of travel, gardening, shipping, singing, plumbing, Catholicism, midwesternism, mozzarella, the A train, New Jersey.
Norris is right, but this blog post is about one thing: detail. Would you believe that companies lose hundreds of billions of dollars each year due to poor-quality communication? A Forbes article titled “10 Small Business Website Errors That Drive Customers Away” says, “Website copy must be free of grammatical errors, spelling errors, vague statements, and other defects that tell customers your company doesn’t pay attention to details, lacks sophistication, and is content to do the job halfway.”
How do you, dear reader, feel about this? Would you be more reluctant to fly an airline if its website or other messaging regularly contained obvious errors? Would a prestigious brand—for example, Mercedes-Benz, Four Seasons, the NFL, or Nordstrom—move down a few notches in your eyes if it were regularly guilty of language sloppiness?
Marshall McLuhan famously wrote, “The medium is the message.” If language precision is a medium (it is), then what’s the message that sloppiness sends? On the contrary, what’s the message that precision sends?
In my mind, precision always wins. Mary Norris would surely agree.
