Edit

So there's this girl. She's the publisher's administrative assistant (read: secretary) and she's writing a column for the paper to chronicle her experiences in this self-help housing program called ECHO HELP. It's basically like Habitat for Humanity so her family and a bunch of other families are going to build each others' homes and the "sweat equity" will be their down payment.

So this column of hers. She turned in the first installment and I had to edit it. It was 56 inches of babble. At newspapers, at least the ones I've worked at, we measure stories in inches, not words or paragraphs. The average story or column is between 15-20 inches. Fifty-six inches is unheard of, especially if you're not breaking it up into sections. So I asked her to cut the column to half its length. She e-mailed me the revised version, which was 46 inches.

I ended up whittling it down to 14 inches. I tried to maintain some of her voice, sans the unnecessary filler, and then let her read the final copy. After briefly checking it over and pointing out a grammar problem I'd missed, she said it was fine. Then she said, "Make sure the picture they're running of me looks good. Sometimes they run the pictures too light and it looks bad."

I cut her story down by almost 30 inches, which took forever, but in the end it doesn't matter to her as long as she looks hot in the picture. Sigh.