I have had at least half-a-dozen interactions with people over the last couple weeks where they didn't quite seem to believe that I write all my blog posts, articles, and books myself. I would repeat several times to them, "Really, I write it myself," and yet they still did not quite seem to believe me.
For better or worse, unless I quote someone else, I write every word in this blog, my articles, and my books. That is one of the reasons that you will sometimes see typos and misspellings here -- I am prone to making them and bad at seeing them. And when there is an editor involved -- and good ones help a lot -- I love when they help and I battle back like a pit bull when I think they are making it worse. The key thing for me is the "voice," especially when I write an article or book. I not only edit myself for content and flow, I am always reading the words over and over again to make sure that it sounds like me, like the way I would say something -- the words, the tone, and so on. Some editors get annoyed at me when, after revising one of my sentences, I reject it because "I would never say something like that," but I think that is the most legitimate reason of all to reject a revision.
Earlier in my career, when I first started writing for broader audiences rather than just for peer-reviewed academic journals, I was initially a bit shocked to discover that many of the management books and articles out there have ghostwriters whose names never appear, sometimes appear as a second author, or more often, as the mysterious "with." The first time I learned this was when Jeff Pfeffer and I wrote The Smart Talk Trap (I linked to the HBR version, but here is a free video that explains the point) for the Harvard Business Review. Our editor was Suzy Wetlaufer (now Suzy Welch, yes, married to Jack), Suzy asked me: "are you the author or the writer?" I had no idea what she meant, and she had to explain -- as she giggled about my naivete -- that many HBR articles and management books are written by people whose names never appear on the list of authors. In fact, Suzy told me that she had ghostwritten management best-sellers herself, but wouldn't tell me which ones! As with "The Smart Talk Trap," I still write my articles myself (or with co-authors, who do the writing too, notably Jeff Pfeffer). Yes, sometimes my stuff is edited --sometimes heavily (My recent BusinessWeek essay was the most heavily edited piece I have written in years). Sometimes I love the editing, such as Suzy's suggestion of "The Smart Talk Trap" title. Or my editor Rick Wolff's work on The No Asshole Rule -- Rick really gets the voice I try to sustain. And my favorite editor over the years is Julia Kirby at the Harvard Business Review, who has done four or five articles of mine -- ranging from the original essay that led to The No Asshole Rule (called "More Trouble Than They Are Worth") to an HBR article that I just finished called "How to Be a Good Boss in a Bad Economy," which will appear in a few weeks in the June, 2009 HBR.
I am very picky about dealing with editors. Even the best editors. This partly comes from the years I served as a reviewer and editor of academic journals, where I drove researchers crazy by insisting that they write more clearly. In retrospect, it was probably a bit obnoxious of me to suggest to several renowned academics that they need to read Strunk & White's Elements of Style, and to go through their manuscripts and complain every time they wrote in the passive voice. But I apply the same obsessive standards to myself. I drove Julia and another HBR editor a bit crazy over the wording of the final sentence of the boss article. But it was also fun, in part, because they all had the same obsession with language that I do.
I find that the editors who make things worse take away my voice and my style. Indeed, I blogged (they called us "thought leaders") at Harvard Business Online for several months (see here, they are still up), but --even though it was a blog -- I had an editor there who repeatedly dulled the emotion and sharpness of my arguments, cut what he saw as digressions, and told me again and again that my posts were "too long and too emotional" for a "corporate blogger" (He is no longer there). Indeed, he edited me far more heavily -- as I pointed out to him -- than any editor I have ever had for my four books and about as heavily as HBR editors do for articles that appear in the magazine (but Suzy, Julia, and also Bronwyn Fryer understand my voice better, and arguably, have helped my strengthen -- rather than destroy and obscure -- my voice). And as for length (as I told this editor many times) I sometimes write posts that are longer than other bloggers on purpose. It is who I am -- and I don't believe that any post over about 500 words is automatically too long.
So, to return to the main point, yes I appreciate and benefit from good editing (even heavy editing) and I battle like crazy against bad editing (and sometimes lose). Certainly, there are drawbacks to my style, and I worry like crazy about ways to improve my style (especially in books and articles). But whatever you read under my name, I've written and struggled over every sentence.
P.S. My memory that Charles Barkley told the press he hadn't read his own book was partly wrong -- it was worse than I recalled as he disagreed with what his ghostwriter wrote and used that as an explaination for why he was misquoted in his own book. I dug up the story. It turns out that, when reporters started asking him about some controversial quotes in his forthcoming book Outageous, he disagreed with some of the nasty things said about teammates, notably Manute Bol. The 1991 story also indicates that he tried to stop publication of the book, but after realizing it was too late because Simon & Schuster had already printed 60,000 copies, he told the press "There are going to be a couple of things (wrong). The majority of the book is correct, and I stick by it." I wonder, if he hadn't read the book, how he knew the other stuff was right!
