The Editing Process

See the exhibition label to learn more

Mary Norris: My name is Mary Norris. I was copy editor at The New Yorker for several years, beginning at about 1982, when William Shawn was editor in chief. You are looking at a manuscript page from Truman Capote’s “In Cold Blood.” It would have come to the copy desk from the Shawn office for setup. The editor, Mr. Shawn, had accepted the piece and done the initial manuscript edit, and then handed it off to the copy editor, whose job was to give instructions to the printer, read the piece, and impose house style. 

In the body, he has capitalized “far west” and changed Capote’s “Midwest” to “Middle West,” because those were the magazine’s preferences. He has taken out some of Capote’s unnecessary hyphens. In short, the copy editor makes only technical changes—nothing subtle or interpretive. The subtle changes, in regular pencil, are William Shawn’s.

The first real change—and this is typical of Shawn’s editing—is a cut. It’s a small one. “A lonesome area of the state that Kansans call ‘out there’” becomes simply “a lonesome area that Kansans call ‘out there.’” I could say a few things about this. First, you realize that the author doesn’t need the deleted word; he has already mentioned Kansas, which we know is a state, and will soon refer to Kansans, denizens of the state.

So we don’t need that extra information telling us that Kansas is a state. It’s kind of redundant to have that “of the state.” 

One of the pleasures of being on the copy desk was getting to see the editors’ marks on the manuscript. Whenever Shawn made a cut, you could see the edges of the prose close up around the words, and it was always an improvement.