Imagine Wine from Wastewater
Letter to the editor - published 12/26/2020
From The Anniston Star of 12/26/2020. Click the link to see the letter.
Let’s rap about editing!
This one started as a slightly longer letter, which you can see on my Column Inches by Chris blog here.
I much prefer the original title, “A Vile Vintage.” The headline in The Star sounds like a discarded lyric from a John Lennon song. However, by now I’m used to editors supplying their own headlines. As usual, from my point of view, the newspaper headline spills the beans, even though the letter itself gets to the point very quickly. Within the very first sentence, the reader would know that this letter is about wastewater wine. But what do I know about the science of writing headlines? Maybe it is necessary to be very explicit if you want the reader to read the letter or story at all. So for instance, if The Count of Monte Cristo was a letter to the editor, the new title would be (spoiler alert) Wrongly Imprisoned Guy Escapes and Prospers. Fans of escaping and prospering would say, “Count me in,” and commence reading. Lovers of suspense and the slow build would not bother reading it, but perhaps they (we) are in the minority.
I recall when I worked in information technology at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, I was surprised to learn that editors, not reporters and writers, supply most headlines. The Star has run a few of my headlines as submitted, but I no longer worry about that (though obviously I do comment on it).
The title aside, the version printed in The Anniston Star is almost exactly what I submitted. They did cut “Rainsville, AL,” down to “Rainsville,” and I do wish they had cut out the comma since they cut out the state abbreviation, but what, the, hey, can’t, have, too, many, commas. The original that appears on Column Inches by Chris is a bit longer. The Anniston Star has a 200-word limit on letters to the editor. I have exceeded that limit in the past, with varying results. One time, a very long letter was elevated to a column spot and printed verbatim, and they even added graphics. In other cases, over-long letters have been chopped down to size, sometimes in ways that ruin jokes or even misstate my original point. Other times, they ran my long submissions in full but only on the website, not in print. Having learned from those experiences, I edited this one myself before submitting it, cutting it down to less than 200 words. My theory was that if I did not trigger a length edit, the editor might approach it with a scalpel instead of a hacksaw. This cost me one sentence about moonshine, and an extra joke about wine review columns, both of which I amputated and then sewed up nicely without leaving much gore (I feel ill now—why did I use surgical imagery). But I think the shortened version works very nicely, and it didn’t get hacked up by someone else.
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