We can edit our speech for more clarity. Be like an OK’er at The New Yorker magazine.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

At BBC Sounds - The Media Show on February 20, 2025 there is an interview titled The Explanation: The Media Show: Diplomacy and the media and 100 years of the New Yorker. The editor, David Remnick was interviewed, and he discussed their unusual process for articles at 20:35:

 

“The writer sends in the first draft. It’s 10,000 words or how ever long the piece is. What happens then? And then he or she sits down with the editor, who’s read it, at least once right away and they have discussions about further work to be done on it.

 

There are copy editors and something called wildly OK’ers. OK’ers? OK’ers! What do they do? Which is a high position of copy editor but the mission is clarity. Not to rob the writer of his or her voice, but clarity. This is a very high premium here.

 

And the other very high premium is accuracy and fairness. We have 28 fact checkers, not just to make sure you spell a complicated name correctly, or get the dates right, but also to call the sources and say is it true that you said this?    

 

Just clear up exactly what an OK’er is. Because there are going to be people listening right now who are thinking maybe I need an OK’er in my business. Help us understand the role. What precisely is an OK’er doing? An OK’er is a higher version of copy editing.

 

Copy editing is, you know, that and which and misspellings and sentences.  OK’ers, if they’re good at it, are giving a final read that is aimed at clarity and misdirection and indirection and vague wording and things that could be even that much clearer.

 

These are people – it’s like somebody who can tune a piano without a tuning fork. People who are really tuned in to language and repetition and just the act of clarity and accuracy.”   

 

Earlier Mary Norris discussed the page OK’er in her 2016 book Between You and Me: Confessions of a Comma Queen:

 

“And it has now been more than twenty years since I became a page OK’er – a position that exists only at The New Yorker where you query-proofread pieces and manage them, with the editor, the author, a fact checker, and a second proofreader, until they go to press. An editor once called us prose goddesses; another job description might be comma queen. Except for writing, I have never seriously considered doing anything else.”

 

We can be the OK’er for the speech we are writing by reading it one more time, just for clarity.

 

My cartoon was adapted from one at Openclipart.