Oh what a wonderful post Friday about writers and editors. Makes me jump up and down: In one place the Comma Queen, John McPhee (I’m working through a collection of his essays), and my editor.
Of my 95 posts on the FCPA Blog (now 96), none were my sole effort, thank goodness for that!
Great insight from Michelangelo and his approach to omission: “Every block of stone has a statue inside it, and it is the task of the sculptor to discover it.”
Elizabeth Turk starts with 500 pounds of marble to find 45 pounds of a ribbon floating on a wind, like this:
There is a lesson for me in it.
Blow off 450 pounds of ranting into a pleasing, flowing essential point that speaks for itself. The reader gets it, as Hemingway advised. But it’s the editor as Guardian Angel watching over the connection that makes the magic.
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Michael Scher is a senior editor of the FCPA Blog. He has over three decades of experience as a senior compliance officer and attorney for international transactions. He’ll be a speaker at the FCPA Blog NYC Conference 2016.
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