Much information is kept from trial juries.
It is thought that elaborate rules of evidence are necessary to ensure
a fair trial; that if juries had all the information available to them,
they would make worse, not better decisions. Juries are not told that
a defendant has three prior convictions for drunk driving or theft.
Juries are not told that a plaintiff in a civil trial has unsuccessfully
sued 13 other people.
It is believed that the common man, unschooled in
impartiality, intemperate and hot-headed, will be unable to parse the
facts with the same clarity as the police, prosecutors, judges and defense
lawyers, who are given all the information. Juries make life or death
decisions based on information that has been vigorously scrubbed to
remove excitable facts.
Newspapers use this same reasoning when editing letters
to the editor. Published letters are often heavily edited for style,
clarity, grammar, spelling and length. Often, editors will restructure
arguments, guided by some oracular divination of what the writer intended.
It is newspaper convention to remove disjointed thoughts, imprecision
and rough language. It is thought that greeting and salutations should
be replaced and standardized – that letters that start with "Dear
Sir," or "Yo!" should all start with, "To the Editor."
Why? People moved to West Marin in order to leave a homogenized world
where workers enter data in Office Depot cubicle bereft of personal
decoration. Why should the letters be edited to remove all personal
decoration?
The letters section of the Point Reyes Light
functions as the town hall of West Marin. Should the speakers in a town
hall have to speak into a microphone that sanitizes their speech? Should
it morph all voices into a genderless, regionally indistinct monotone
so every speaker is on an even playing field? A person in a meeting
stands before his listeners. His speech, his manner, his boots and disposition
all come under scrutiny. This is the same reason that trials demand
the witness be present before the jury. We wouldn’t have a death
penalty case decided by a jury who only read transcripts of cross-examination
and never got to see the witness blanch. I can’t bring the letter
writers to your house to speak, but I can let their letters reflect
their personality as much as possible.
Henceforth, letters to the Point Reyes Light
will be edited only for length, obvious typos and misspellings –
unless the letter is pathologically misspelled, in which case it will
be run verbatim.
The more information readers have regarding the letter
writer the better they will be able to assess the convincing force of
the letter. If someone puts forward an argument in a disjointed, poorly
spelled and rambling fashion, the reader should see it thus. For if
the letter is poorly crafted, so too may be the writer’s arguments.
If a letter is clearly written, with an easily followed train of thought,
the persuasive force will be greater.
Editors worry that the newspaper will itself look
unprofessional if it prints a letter in which there are no paragraphs
or missing all capitalization. I am less worried about how the paper
looks than how the writers look. It is their fear of how they will look
in print that worries me most.
My concern is that readers will fear to write in if
their letters may subject them to ridicule. Many readers ask the editor
to fix up their letters and make them sound good. They feel uncomfortable
commenting on an issue unless an editor rewrites their letter.
My goal is not to be cruel but to be more
transparent and informative. It is an evolutionary experiment. I imagine
that the new letters policy will cost The Light some letters.
I will truly mourn their absence – just as a general weeps before
the headstone of a soldier who died defending the city.
What then of the inarticulate but correct writer,
one whose convincing force is reduced by inarticulate expression, by
poor grammar and spelling? Do they need to be babied by an editor? While
studying in New York City, I came upon a Narcotics Anonymous meeting
in an East Village basement. The speakers spoke roughly, often with
poor syntax, and heavily accented English, but were some of the most
eloquent speakers I have ever heard. The truth sounds like the truth
whether spoken in Cockney or the Queen’s English.