How we decide which words to remove
· 2 min read
Every article on this site carries two versions: the outlet's wording, and ours.
Ours is the same report with the words that grade it taken out. This is what
that means in practice, because a claim like "we remove the editorialising" is
worth nothing unless you can see the rule.
What goes
A word goes when it tells you how to feel about something rather than what
happened. "A devastating loss" and "a loss" describe the same result; one of
them has a verdict attached. So do framing phrases that instruct you before the
sentence has started — "in a stunning rebuke," — and sentences that are the
writer's judgment rather than a report of anything.
What stays
Facts, numbers, dates, names and places, and every word inside quotation marks.
A quotation is what somebody said; editing inside one puts words in their mouth.
Attribution stays too. "Police said" is a fact about who is making a claim, and
removing it turns their claim into ours.
Superlatives stay, and are marked as claims rather than deleted. "The
competition's oldest rivals" is an assertion somebody made and can be checked.
Removing it would leave "the competition's rivals", which says something
different and usually says nothing.
Adjectives that classify rather than judge stay: federal, quarterly, Victorian,
third-quarter. Take one of those out and you have changed a fact, not a tone.
The two questions after every edit
Deciding each word on its own is the right unit for the decision and the wrong
unit for the consequence, because the consequence lands on the sentence. So
after every removal the engine reads the sentence again and asks two things.
Does it still work? A sentence that has lost its verb, or ends on a preposition
with nothing after it, is worse than the word that was removed.
Does it still say what it said? Where a word carries more information than
drama, it stays. We learned this one by getting it wrong: a report that somebody
was found with violent extremist material became a report that they were found
with material, which is not a calmer version of the story — it is a different
and untrue one.
A removal that fails either question is put back, and the check runs again, up
to three times, because putting one word back changes the sentence the next
removal is judged against.
When we get it wrong
We do, and the corrections ledger is public for that reason. If you find a
sentence where the edit changed the facts rather than the temperature, it is a
bug and we want it: support@mundaneread.com.
Written by Mundane Read. If we have something wrong, tell us and it goes in the corrections ledger.