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Banksy on the oil spill

As is so often the case, Banksy gives a lot of extract here:

And if you haven’t seen it, allow me to heartily recommend Exit Through the Gift Shop.

Tortured editors, torturing

When my fiance, Katie, was in college, and I had a numbing office job, she would send me her papers which I would happily edit because her efforts to gain a Bachelor’s in political science out-gained my interest in the mortgage industry.  Katie was a rigorous researcher, and her distended papers reflected the growth of her education within the confines of page or word limits.  Her sentences, especially in the opening paragraphs, wound long and twisted through multiple clauses and ideas.  My primary job was to edit for clarity and consistency, because I did not possess the education to edit for facts.  The first five pages of a 15 page essay bled red, and the 10 pages to follow displayed somewhat more monochromatically.

The editors at Vanity Fair chose to have some fun with Sarah Palin’s resignation speech, and took their red, blue, and green pens to the black&white transcript.  The color nearly equals the text upon which it comments.  Some of their edits are so thorough that it seems amazing they found the ball amidst such thick rough.

Behold this line from the speech:

Seward withstood such disdain as he chose the uncomfortable, unconventional but right path to secure Alaska so that Alaska could help secure the United States.

And now the same sentence after Vanity Fair gets through with it:

Seward, however, secured Alaska realizing that Alaska could secure the United States.

The whole speech is edited harshly enough to render its eight pages a tough slog.  It’s clear the editors took a heavy hand to the speech, altering lines that did not require such slashing.  The research editor took things even further, arguing against the speech within the comments.  The gimmick is fun to look at from a distance–look at all that red!–but up close, the edits are taxing and overly severe.

(Hat tip to Motivated Grammar)