# EDITING: On your PC monitor or from a hard copy?

**URL:** <https://boards.straightdope.com/t/editing-on-your-pc-monitor-or-from-a-hard-copy/269209>\
**Category:** Cafe Society\
**Created:** [October 14, 2004, 4:17pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/editing-on-your-pc-monitor-or-from-a-hard-copy/269209 "2004-10-14T16:17:22Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 2\
**Page:** 2

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**Author:** ![Exapno\_Mapcase](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/exapno_mapcase/32/1051_2.png) [@Exapno\_Mapcase](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Exapno_Mapcase)\
**Post date:** [October 15, 2004, 9:06pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/editing-on-your-pc-monitor-or-from-a-hard-copy/269209/21 "2004-10-15T21:06:33Z")

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> [@Carnac the Magnificent!](#):
>
> I’ve read your posts before. You’re obviously an excellent writer.
> 
> So please speculate why hard copy editing is different. **Bryan Ekers** has a good theory. Care to offer yours? I just don’t get it.

I wrote out a long answer and thought I posted to this yesterday and I wonder where in the æther it went off to.

In short, while I don’t know the answer, I gave three guesses.

One off-the-wall one is that it’s harder to hold one’s head up straight and concentrate on a fixed point in front of one’s eyes than it is to look down and do so. We learn to read and write with the paper on a surface, after all.

The other guesses had to do with font and contrast. Most printers are still far more pixel dense than even high-resolution screens so the individual characters are sharper and blacker. Black on white is good high contrast for reading, and the glare of a white screen is far more distracting than the cool white surface of paper.

And I thank you very much for the compliment.

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**Author:** ![whistlepig](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/w/73ab20/32.png) [@whistlepig](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/whistlepig)\
**Post date:** [October 16, 2004, 1:35am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/editing-on-your-pc-monitor-or-from-a-hard-copy/269209/22 "2004-10-16T01:35:23Z")

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I do a lot of editing and I’m better on hardcopy. But if I have to share my edits I prefer electronic edits.

It also depends on the type of editing - If I’m writing new or revised text I prefer electronic. If I have to do a ton of word replacements or re-writing sentences it’s easier to do it on paper.

But I always do a final edit on paper before I give it to our proofreader.

One thing I’ve learned - if you are doing comments on a document from a number of people nothing beats having the document with each person’s comments/suggested text color coded up on a large screen. You can then do a “group edit” to get final text. It’s an excruciating process but no one can say their comments were ignored by the editing process. And everyone has a much better buy-in on the final product.

Whistlepig

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