Friday, August 14, 2020

Minimum Edits

We call them light edits or minimum edits. Yesterday posted a link to a page for the Shunryu Suzuki minimally edited lectures going up this year. Today featuring a page for all that we consider minimum edits. Among ourselves we actually just write LE and put an LE at the end of the file name with the initials of the person who worked on it. As more than one go over it we include that info at the bottom. Maybe minimum edit is a better name. That's what yesterday and today's charts call them. The hard work was done by noble followers of Cuke Archives. The first to do it was Gordon Geist and he did a ton of them back in the early days of cuke.com. Some of them just come that way such as the early Los Altos and SFZC lectures. Marian Derby and others who transcribed them, clearly did that basic editing as part of the transcribing or at least that's how they come to us. They weren't doing literary or consumer oriented edits like for the books and Wind Bells. But maybe something in between. We can't say for sure - if there's no audio to check it against. The purpose of the minimum edits is to make them easier to read and follow. Some people prefer to read the verbatim. I use the verbatim when I have that choice. But lots of folks would much more rather read the minimum edits which follow everything he said and smooth it out. The Suzuki lecture excerpts that I post I always minimally edit. --- thanks Peter Ford for making these two pages on shunryusuzuki.com.