Most everything you read, from a news story to a presidential biography to a tweet, has an argument. Half of being a good editor is remembering this fact at every waking moment of your professional life and springing into action when the thesis gets lost. If the reader loses sight of the point you’re making, they get confused. Suddenly there goes the force that’s holding them to the chair.
So I was a little bit alarmed last year when I read a comment from one of my peer reviewers saying they were not sure my book’s thesis was entirely supported. They didn’t elaborate much on that, and the language was rather mild, so I made a few small notes of ways I might reinforce my argument, but didn’t think much else of it.
A few months later, another person at the press left a similar comment in my manuscript: I hadn’t completely proven the central argument. Again, I was annoyed and a little frightened. I talked it over with my editor who offered reassurances — she had been through her own edit and was satisfied, but encouraged me to sit with those comments and look at the manuscript with fresh eyes when I got copy edits back.
In the meantime, I repeated the main points of my argument in my head to test its strength, running my hands over thick knots of rope, looking for frayed threads. It all sounded right.
I recognize it might be frustrating to read me talk about The Argument without knowing what it is, and now that the book is coming out I need to stop being so cagey about talking about what’s in it. So here’s the argument in extreme miniature:
At the root of UNC’s fake classes scandal was the core contradiction of the NCAA’s amateur myth. Specifically, the assertion that athletes in big-time programs are students first — key to the maintenance of amateurism, a concept that protects the NCAA’s status quo — can place inordinate pressure on athletes and academic-support staff to find curricular loopholes to ease some of that strain. This is what happened at UNC.
I’ve pressure tested this bad boy *slaps hood of Argument* so many times I’m not worried about whether it’s true. I’m convinced that it is.
But when I revisited the manuscript recently to respond to copy edits and to update the afterword, I was alarmed to discover that there were some gaps. To get extra technical with you, I hadn’t fully unpacked what the phrase “amateurism” means — both, like, its dictionary meeting, but also the way it has evolved in the context of college sports. By not doing enough to fully dissect the term toward the beginning of the book I’d forced the reader to enter into the argument in a place of uncertainty, making it hard to see any sense in my conclusion.
This is, to put it lightly, not what you want. By the copy editing stage you want your argument to be pretty much airtight. (I’m guessing; this is my first book.)
How could this have happened? The answer, I think, is a syndrome editors and writers everywhere encounter: The more times you read something, the less effectively you’re able to understand and improve what’s on the page. (The first edit is precious. Sometimes I’ll put off editing something important for the first time until I know I have a good amount of time to sit with it. You’ll never be able to recreate the first time you read something; if you’re an editor, it’s the only shot you have at simulating what the reader’s experience will be.) The more times I read my own book, the less incisively I was able to gauge the strength of the argument. By the time I’d submitted it I wasn’t really reading the words on the page.
I think time away from the manuscript (and working to incorporate the events of the pandemic into the arc of my argument, in the afterword) let me see things more clearly. So I dived back into the early chapters. A few paragraphs here, a few sentences there. If it were a movie, it was the equivalent of reshooting a couple scenes to add a few more lines of dialogue.
Don’t fact check me on Jaws having reshoots, I just googled it / / / photo credit
Hey, preorder the book!
I know comparing my book to a movie production plagued by reshoots isn’t the most enticing sales pitch, but I think it’s more Jaws, less Solo: A Star Wars Story. Plus, you’ve been reading this long, so you might as well pull the trigger. At $17, (use promo code UMFALL21 and buy here for that discount) it’s basically the price of a movie ticket plus some popcorn.
Remember, if you preorder the book and forward me your confirmation email by this Monday, I’ll send you an expanded version this year’s Controversy Bracket™ — a March Madness-style bracket in which the college that has seen the most controversy over the past year prevails. I’ve already started building a list of the contenders and lemme tell ya, this past year was 100% terrible.
— Andy
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