Editing is part skill and part art. As an editor, Mr. Philately is Leonardo da Vinci. He�s an excellent editor overall and he�s particularly good at making writing tighter. When Kat, whose writing style occasionally veers toward the verbose, goes over word and page limits, she yells for her father. With the full respect every teen gives a parent she does not call him da Vinci. She calls him Mr. Slash-and-Burn.

As an editor, I�m more akin to one of the talented students of Frank Lloyd Wright. I recognize structural problems and fix them. I can take someone else�s vision and make sure the plumbing is well constructed. I can copy what other good editors do. But I can�t find the Mona Lisa in a canvas of paint blotches.

Still, I�m a competent editor who is in some demand. But I�m not a natural editor like Mr. Philately and I had to learn my craft. I learned it at the hands of teachers who took the time to explain how to use outlining as a tool to diagnose when the scaffolding of the writing was weak and who explained how diagraming sentences could reveal why the sentence was a mess. I�m an editor because I was taught how to do it.

All of which is a roundabout way to get to the real topic today: peer editing. One current educational fad is peer editing. Kids are urged (or forced) to give their papers to other children to edit. They then edit other children�s papers. In theory, the experience is supposed to help teach children to spot errors and to think about good writing. But they are rarely given a rubric or explicit guidance that allows them to manage even a workmanlike job of editing. Some of them find spelling errors. The better find grammar errors. Few of them find the types of holes that sink the ships and even fewer know how to walk someone through fixing them.

Kat�s English class is going to peer-edit each other�s papers on Monday. The papers are on the symbolism in Romeo and Juliet. Few of them other than Kat like Shakespeare. Many of them are having trouble grasping the symbolism in the play so I expect a lot of major problems in their essays. They then will take these structurally unsound papers and fix each other�s spelling. It will be something like repainting the living room in one of those California houses that is about to fall down the cliff into the ocean.

Having polished these papers as suggested by their peers, they then will turn them in and wonder why the grades are not what they hoped for. While the teacher is a very hard grader who once complained that she just �had to� give Kat an A on an essay, other than her no-A quirk, her grades usually make sense. The kids, however, will not catch that. They fixed the errors after all, didn�t they?

If we want to teach editing (and I think we do), we have to teach editing. We have to focus those who are editing. We have to show them what to look for. Otherwise, the edit is meaningless. Talent helps but skill can substitute for talent up to a point. We can�t all be Mr. Philately but we can learn to fix the plumbing�but we shouldn�t be expected to do it until someone�s handed us a manual. We need to build editors one pipe at a time.

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