If you write, you need an editor.

Thirty-five years ago, the manuscript of T.S. Eliot's "The Waste Land" was published in a facsimile edition with an introduction by the poet's widow, Valerie Eliot. It is hugely instructive, in part because it shows Ezra Pound's role in the development of the poem.

The first full page of the manuscript shows a series of diagonal slashes in pencil -- Eliot canceling and deleting an entire page of text. Another couple of pages, and Pound's annotations begin to appear: "Too often used," "Too tum-pum at a stretch," "too penty," "dogmatic deduction but wobbly as well."

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You Don't Say: Language and Usage (a blog by John McIntyre) See the facsimile edition of T.S. Eliot's "The Waste Land," with Ezra Pound's annotations here, on Amazon.com. (If you'd like to purchase the book from Amazon, Poynter will receive a small cut as an Amazon associate.)

Here, one of the great poems of the 20th century reflects two fundamental principles of editing: Ruthlessly cut out everything that does not directly contribute to the overall effect, and take the advice of a knowledgeable colleague. Now we can understand more clearly Eliot's dedication: "For Ezra Pound/il miglior fabbro" -- the greater craftsman.

But today, as newspapers struggle to survive, the very idea of editing is being called into question, with consequences that do not look encouraging.

An article in The New York Times about Knight Ridder disclosed that as the corporation was spiraling toward collapse, some panjandrum at corporate headquarters proposed that the company could save a few dollars by consolidating the copy editing for all the newspapers. The idea was so richly stupid that not even Knight Ridder carried it out. Perhaps someone realized that getting the local details wrong is one of the surest means to irritate and alienate readers.

An even more pernicious idea has come to the fore: that doing away with editing itself is not only cheaper, but better. Doug Fisher, writing on his Common Sense Journalism blog about the push for economies in publication, quotes a column by Roy Greenslade of the Guardian, about likely job cuts at the Telegraph group:
Such an attitude is, of course, congruent with all the cant about the obsolescence of the mainstream media and the golden future that will dawn as writer and reader enjoy direct and unmediated contact.

This dangerous nonsense can only be put forward by people who lack an understanding of what editors and copy editors do. (That category, regrettably, includes many editors, managing editors and publishers.) Detecting and correcting error -- error of fact, error of grammar and syntax, misjudgment of tone or taste -- is invisible. What gets caught does not get published.

We need to demonstrate the value of editing.

At the suggestion of a colleague, I've asked The Sun's news and features copy editors to send me a weekly account of their top two or three catches. It has been instructive:

• If a reporter uses the word site for sight three times in an article, as in not letting an item out of your site, that is a minor slip -- but not one that bolsters the reader's confidence in the writer's authority.
• If a wire service article says that a dam "could be taken out next as the agency removes obstructions to boaters and eels swimming upstream to spawn," the reader's amusement at the image of boaters swimming upstream to spawn will come at the expense of the writer.
  
• If an article says that a high school athlete died this summer as a result of hypothermia, any reader who knows that hypothermia results from cold and understands that the writer should have written hyperthermia will experience a reduced sense of the writer's credibility.
  
• If an article about politics is careless with its pronouns, using they in a sentence in which the antecedent was Republicans but which was intended to mean Democrats, and using he in a sentence that had as the antecedent a Republican but which was intended to mean a Democrat, then the paper's correction column will grow a little larger.
  

All of these errors, and more like them, were caught by a single Sun copy editor during August.

In a workshop on editing, I use the text of an article that is one of the purest examples of libel that I have ever seen. It accuses a number of named individuals of criminal actions, for which the article presents absolutely no foundation, and in fact presents information undercutting the credibility of the person making the accusations. This article was written by a reporter with more than 25 years' seniority at the paper, and it was moved to the copy desk, with the libel intact, by a department head. Had a couple of alert copy editors not caught it and sounded the alarm, the principal question in the publisher's mind the day of publication would have been how many zeroes to put to the left of the decimal in the settlement check.

So go ahead. Reduce, centralize, abolish the copy desk. Give readers that unmediated contact with the writer. Keep your lawyers on retainer and your checkbook close at hand.

I am not presenting these examples to sneer at colleagues on the reporting staff. I have given 20 years of my life to The Sun, working on the copy desk to ensure that what we publish is as accurate, precise and clear as we know how to make it. And even in the diminished circumstances of the current business climate for newspapers, The Sun continues to present, seven days a week, information of importance and interest to its readers.

No, the reporters at my paper are not a corps of bumblers, but a group of diligent professionals who, like all other human beings, have an innate capacity for error, particularly as they attempt to produce thousands of words of prose every 24 hours. That fallibility is why the paper has ordained and established a regimen of editing on the assigning desk and double-checking on the copy desk.

Writers are not necessarily the best judges of their own work. If T.S. Eliot needed help with "The Waste Land," are you sure that you don't need to ask for any?

Publications stand or fall on their credibility. They hire editors to vet articles for accuracy, to ensure clarity and precision of language, to detect libel, plagiarism and fabrication.

Are you sure you want to go bare? Are you really sure?

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John McIntyre is the assistant managing editor for the copy desk at The (Baltimore) Sun, an adjunct instructor in journalism at Loyola College of Maryland and a past president of the American Copy Editors Society. He also writes a blog, "You Don't Say: Language and Usage," found on The Sun's Web site.