By Sara Dickinson Quinn
Merrill Perlman has doubts. So, she looks things up, does the math, figures things out, finds the focus.
 Merrill Perelman recently left The New York Times to work as a journalism consultant and freelance editor. Reach her at [email protected]
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After spending 25 years at The New York Times, working on and directing the copy desks, she has developed more than a few good editing tricks. She's also developed the careers of some of the world's finest copy editors.
If you're lucky, you'll hear her speak at the American Copy Editors Society's conference in Minneapolis at the end of April or at one of her other training engagements around the U.S. For now, here are a few of her thoughts about editing.
"You want to try to get people to stop reading and start seeing," Perlman said. "If you're reading, you might be looking at the words and not getting a picture. You really want the images to form in your head and you want to watch the movie that's unfolding."
Sara Dickenson Quinn: You've chosen a rather chaotic film clip here as a lesson about editing. What can you tell me about it?
Merrill Perlman: It's an over-pixelated clip from the movie "Braveheart." You really can't tell what's going on, except that you know there's an awful lot of stuff. People are falling all over. You can sort of tell it's a battle scene. But you can't tell who's on whose side, who's getting hurt. There's too much going on.
How can this relate to editing a written story?
Perlman: The story equivalent of that would be: too many verbs in a sentence. Too many verbs in a lede, too many verbs in an image.
Stories that particularly suffer from this are court stories, where each verb is an action. It might say:
"The court voted to overturn a lower court decision."
So, we have a vote, overturning a decision. Now, your head can jerk back and forth and you get whiplash trying to figure out which way they voted. What gets more complicated is if they voted to overturn a ban on something. So, what does that mean?
There's too much action going on in that sentence. And the reader is just going to get lost. You want to slow the action down. You want people to understand what's going on. And if it means over-simplifying, that's fine:
"A court ruled yesterday that a petition can go ahead." Rather than:
"A court overturned a lower court's ruling that banned a petition."
Let's talk about numbers.
Perlman: The movie "A Beautiful Mind," based on the book written by Sylvia Nasar, is about this brilliant man who is a savant with numbers. He could process thousands of numbers of formulas and new ways of looking at them. He's a true, mathematical genius.
 A scene from the 2001 film, "A Beautiful Mind," shows actor Russell Crowe amid a sea of numbers.
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There's a scene
in the movie where he is standing in a room and there are all of these
numbers around him and they're lighting up, and they're flashing, and
there are formulas. It's one of those 360-degree shots, where the
camera is moving around him. He's absolutely surrounded by numbers.
The audience has no idea what's going on in his head, because there are just too many numbers.
That's exactly what happens in a news story sometimes, when someone says, "I've got all of these great statistics ... and there's no time to put together a graphic." Or, "I didn't think about putting together a graphic ... So, I'm just going to tell you that:
'Last year 1.4 million cars, each one carrying an average of 3.2 people, paid the $8 toll for the George Washington bridge, which yielded a revenue of $11.2 million, of which $355,000 went for painting.'"
It would take a John Nash to follow that.
Perlman: The rule of thumb is, no more than two or three numbers per paragraph. And then, let the reader rest a little, before you throw more numbers at them.
Numbers confuse people.
Perlman: Yes. And, from an editor's point of view, if you have too many numbers, even your eyes start to glaze over. And ... you're going to make the million/billion error.
What is the million/billion error?
Perlman: The million/billion error is probably one of the most common errors. At many papers, it happens about once a month. People focus on the number. OK, does the math work? OK, the revenues were 1.4 million and now they're 1.6 million ... OK, the numbers match.
But, what I didn't notice is that it's not 1.4 million, it was 1.4 billion! Because I'm looking at the 1.4 and not looking after it. It's an error of focus.
It's like perspective; you need to step back and say, here's the number, what's the modifier? That's true of a lot in editing. You focus on one thing, but you need to step back and see what's surrounding it. Frequently, the modifier is not the right one.
Late
last year, before this interview was conducted, I rode with Merrill on
a sightseeing trolley here in St. Petersburg. We were tired. We'd
taught a long day at Poynter. The trolley driver blah-de-blahed about
some movie that had been filmed in St. Petersburg, how many palm trees
there were in the city. I dunno.
Then, he mentioned that there were more than 135,000 flights that went in and out of our little downtown airport each year.
I nodded as I stared out the window of the trolley. Um-hmm. Then, I noticed that Merrill had pulled out her calculator and was busy punching in numbers. She showed me her tally and shook her head, seeming to say "that would mean that there were 370 flights through that little airport each day. Couldn't be."
We finished the tour, gave the driver a tiny tip for his whopper of a tale and went on our way.
A good editor questions the veracity of things for those of us who just sort of believe everything we read and hear.
CORRECTION: The original version of this story incorrectly described the biography "A Beautiful Mind" and incorrectly named the movie that the clip is taken from.
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