Six Questions for Blogger, cont.

The subject of this series is the amateurish and ineffective explanations and directions on Google's Blogger, the site that hosts this blog. Earlier posts in this series appear below.

Question #2 : Are you familiar with the editorial verity, "Writers and editors know more than readers"? Are you familiar with any editorial verities?

A professional verity is a truth informed by long experience in varying conditions.

Verities are guides, not commandments. Like The Constitution of the United States, they lend themselves to many interpretations.

There are at least a dozen editorial verities: "People like to see and read about people," for example, and "display type is as or more important than body copy," to name two. Knowing the verities is not enough to produce effective written communications. Smart judgments informed by meaningful experience are also required.

The "house" text on Blogger suggests either that there are no editors on staff or that Blogger editors have no authority. There's a third possibility: Blogger editors don't know what they're doing; they don't know the verities—among other things.

I don't know what the problem is. All I can tell you, as a new Blogger user, is that there is a problem. Blogger's house text is not very helpful.

I gave a talk at the Stanford Publishing Course about the Editorial Verities. This is what I said, slightly modified to apply to website editors, about Editors knowing more than readers:

As editors, we live, talk, dream, and breathe our subjects hour after hour, day after day. We talk shop with colleagues. We read what others are saying about our sites. We attend conferences. Through immersion, we become experts on our subject, slinging around acronyms and relevant themes with impressive and genuine familiarity.

It's easy to forget that our job as editors at complex, dynamic websites is to inhabit our users' perspective and to address that perspective—organizing, elucidating, and interpreting, rather than simply porting everything we know over to the page.

We must ask ourselves consciously and constantly, "Will this make sense to a user, one who likely cannot draw upon all the rich associations I can?" Asking this question requires stepping out of ourselves, our experience, our specialty, our concentration. It also requires specialized understanding of written language and how to make it effective. There's no other way.