The Situation of Red Ink
When I turned in the first draft of the first chapter of my first book, I felt confident. I’d always felt confident as a writer. I was, after all, the guy other people always came to when they wanted help with their own writing. What reason did I have to be nervous?When I got the chapter back from my editor, it oozed with corrections. They gushed out from every paragraph. Every sentence. In red, of course—the classic color of corrections.
According to psychology professor Abraham Rutchick, The Situation of Red Ink is one we may know so well that we automatically become more vigilant—or perhaps ruthless—correctors when we hold in our hands a red pen as opposed to one of any other color.
In an experiment, Rutchick began a series of words and asked participants to correct them. For example: F-A-I-[blank].
RAZ: So people with red pens tended to write an L at the end of that word and people with blue pens would write an R?Prof. RUTCHICK: Precisely.
The default correction color in my editor’s word processing app at the time was—you guessed it—red. I was a crap writer, to be sure, but perhaps I wasn’t quite as bad as my editor insisted. Perhaps if he’d used blue for corrections, he’d have been more, well, FAIR.
You know, I’m glad he didn’t.
