The Story
The Story: Fair copy
n. The clean version of a marked-up text: corrected, legible, and still in the author’s own words.
An edit can make someone sound clearer, and it can just as easily make them sound as though they said the opposite. Both edits use the same tools; the difference lies in whether anyone read the whole recording before deciding what to remove.
A sentence lifted out of a long conversation can sound convincing on its own. Read the next sentence and the meaning often turns around, because the point of one sentence frequently lives in the one that follows it. Anyone who has been quoted out of context knows the feeling: every word was theirs, and the meaning was not.
Cutting is the easy part.
Removing words has never been the hard part of editing. Software can find the pauses, the false starts and the punchiest thirty seconds faster than any person can, and it has become very good at it. What software built to find highlights cannot do by itself is tell the difference between a moment that stands up and a moment that only sounds as if it does.
(cut) Everyone told me (kept) the fastest way to grow a small business is to cut your prices.(cut) So we did. It nearly sent us broke.
Confident. Quotable. The opposite of the speaker’s point.
(kept) Everyone told me the fastest way to grow a small business is to cut your prices. So we did. It nearly sent us broke.
Stet: the proofreader’s mark for “let it stand”. Two sentences longer, and true.
Specimen text, written for this page.
The first version is confident and quotable, and it says the opposite of what the speaker meant. The second is two sentences longer, and it is true.
Understand it before you cut it.
Stet is written in the margin when a correction turns out to be wrong. It restores the original words exactly as they were, which makes it the most humble mark an editor owns: an admission that the author had it right the first time.
Fair Copy began with that instinct applied to recordings, and with the conviction that editing ought to serve the speaker rather than redraw them. Before anything is cut, it should be understood, which means reading the whole recording, working out what it is for and who it is for, and only then deciding what can go. Before anything is published, somebody should be answerable for it, and that somebody is a person rather than a program.
The foul papers and the fair copy.
In the days of handwritten playscripts, an author’s working draft was called the foul papers: crossed out, written over and hard for anyone else to follow. The clean version, corrected and legible and still in the author’s own words, was the fair copy, and often someone other than the author made it.
That arrangement holds the whole idea in miniature, because the person making the fair copy has real authority over the page and no authority at all over what the author meant.
Your recording is the foul papers. The edit should be its fair copy.
Rules somebody wrote on purpose.
The conviction became a set of house rules for the creator’s own channel, written in plain English so that anyone can check the work against them. One of them concerns this very mark: in a Fair Copy edit, speakers stay in the order they spoke, and moving them needs a person’s say-so.
- The original recording is never altered.
- Every cut can be traced to the words it removed, and undone.
- Speakers stay in the order they spoke unless a person approves a change.
- Real humour and real criticism stay. Humiliation and misrepresentation are never manufactured.
- A Short keeps enough of both sides that nobody wins an argument they didn’t win.
- Finished means at least as clear, accurate, fair and watchable as a careful hand edit. Shorter is not the test.
Your projects follow your own brief and instructions. These rules are here to show what kind of decisions sit underneath the software, and that somebody made them on purpose.
From a way of working to a desktop application.
That principle became a way of working, then a system, and eventually a desktop application. The system is STJ Editor, which Jethro Geier designed for his own channel, and Fair Copy Edit grows out of it.
On that channel it has turned a single session of nearly four hours into one coherent video of thirty-four minutes, and it has given a finished documentary a deliberately light edit that removed about a minute and a half. Knowing which of those two jobs a recording needs is part of the work, and the system is built to know the difference.
Technology makes the work possible at a different scale, but it does not make the responsibility disappear, which is why every cut stays traceable to the words it removed and why nothing is published on a machine’s say-so.
Two kinds of making.
Fair Copy is the work of more than one kind of maker, and each deserves its own credit rather than a share of somebody else’s.
- Language and visual identity
- Fair Copy’s copywriter, designer and creative inspiration, pictured.
- Editorial method and system design
- Jethro Geier, who decided what the software must read before it is allowed to cut, how every decision ties back to the source, and what counts as finished.
- Software
- Built with AI coding tools to his specification.
- Editorial reasoning
- AI models, working inside rules a person wrote.
- Checked by
- A person. In your own copy of Fair Copy Edit, that person is you.
Set in Libre Caslon and Courier Prime. Courier is the face of the typed film script and the transcript; Caslon has been setting other people’s words since the 1720s.