Poison Penmanship: The Gentle Art of Muckraking Read Online Free PDF

experience. However, this method may not appeal to everyone. Most writers I know would shudder at the thought of passing around drafts of their work to miscellaneous friends. I can only say it works very well for me, in fact I could hardly survive without it.
    The final step in preparing a manuscript for submission is meticulous proofreading. This may seem too obvious and elementary to mention, yet at both San Jose State and Yale I was continually amazed at the number of jarring and annoying typographical and spelling mistakes, sloppy constructions, confusing inserts in otherwise excellent papers turned in by students. I urged them to consider that failure to proofread is like preparing a magnificent dinner and forgetting to set the table, so that the wretched guests have to scramble for the food as best they can.
    As to the second stage, professional editing, whether your piece will be helped or harmed depends on the individual editor. I recall a very nasty moment when, having been given a contract for The American Way of Death by both an English and an American publisher, I sent them each a draft of the chapter on embalming. It was met with instantaneous and thunderous disapproval from the editors on both sides of the Atlantic; this chapter is too revolting, it must go, they said. I could, of course, have acceded to their wishes and excised the offending passages. After much agonizing, I decided not to do so even though it meant losing the contracts—and I was sustained in this decision by my circle of amateur editors.
    After this disheartening setback the book was eventually accepted by Robert Gottlieb of Simon & Schuster, who loved the embalming chapter and whose sympathetic editing vastly improved the text as a whole. A year after publication, those self-same embalming passages were chosen for inclusion in a college textbook on writing. Well! Of course I felt vindicated. The obvious moral is that although some editors can sometimes perform wonders in improving your work, in the last analysis your own judgment must prevail.
    While book publishers rarely alter a manuscript without the author’s approval, magazine editors, with their space limitations and frantic deadlines, are apt to take all sorts of liberties. The first time I wrote a piece for Life —and was ecstatic over its acceptance—the editor assured me that it would be published as submitted “except for word changes.” It was only after I saw the piece in print that it dawned on me that the only changes that can be made in a written text are word changes. In this collection I have generally used my own unedited manuscript, and will discuss some of the differences between my text and the published version in the comments on these pieces.
    JOURNALISTIC ETHICS. My students at San Jose and Yale often brought up this subject and questioned me closely about what is/isn’t “ethical” when in pursuit of a hot lead. Unfortunately ethics is not one of my strong points, so I am not sure my answers were satisfactory. In general, I think that if you have promised anonymity to the person you are interviewing, or if it is agreed in advance that he is speaking “off the record,” such agreement should be respected. Better, however, to steer him away from such untoward thoughts, which can often be done by fast and dexterous talk about the matter at hand, so that the problem does not arise. I shall have more to say about this in the comment on “Let Us Now Appraise Famous Writers.”
    On a level with “ethics,” and likewise a subject of great interest to my students, is “objectivity.” Some ventured to suggest that I lack this quality. If to be objective means having no point of view, or giving equal weight to all information that comes one’s way, I plead guilty—although accuracy is essential, not only to the integrity of your work but to avoid actionable defamation. It can be ruinous to try to tailor the evidence to fit your preconceptions, or to let your