Writer, Editor, Helper

Dear Carol:Questions from Readers

Dear Carol:

Do freelancers really follow house style? Do we do things that drive project editors crazy? A very good friend who hires freelancers (and used to hire me) recently commented that all freelancers send in terrible work. She’s an ultraperfectionist and micromanager, and while she made me sad, I know I shouldn’t take it personally, but it made me wonder what it is she’s doing after she gets the work back.

Elizabeth

Dear Elizabeth:

Where I work, unless an author complains, we don’t read after our freelancers, so how closely they follow house style is up to them. But your friend might be talking about something else. The assigning editor often has to prepare the edited copy for typesetting, and that’s when a raft of imperfections that writers don’t often notice or care about come to light: these are housekeeping issues that have little to do with house style.

For instance:
—Redlining is unreadable (hyphens and dashes are struck through; global changes in punctuation or inclusive numbers were done with messy tracked changes instead of silently).
—Pagination is eccentric (i.e., not in the upper right-hand corner).
—Syntax is not parallel in tables of contents or lists of figures.
—In final files, cleanup is incomplete (double spaces after periods, spaces before and after hard returns, spaces before and after tabs, extra hard returns above and below subheadings).
—Coding is incomplete (e.g., no coding for flush paragraphs following block quotations, which means they will be typeset with a normal indent).

If you have any doubts about your own work, ask your assigning editor for feedback. If she’s like me, she’ll be happy to oblige.

Carol

Dear Carol,

I wonder if this has ever happened to you: A client tells you he loves the job you did editing his book, sends you a copy of the book when it is published, thanks you (by name) in the acknowledgments, and then, upon reading the book, you notice that the client changed some of your copy, and in doing so, created errors in spelling, punctuation, and grammar. (I went back to my edited copy to make sure I hadn’t overlooked these errors in the original.) This recently happened to me. I am now embarrassed that I have been named as the editor of this book. What is the most diplomatic way to inform the client of his self-created errors in the hard copy? I doubt the author has the funds to do a second (corrected) printing of the book. Thank you.

Wordhelper

Dear Wordhelper,

To have a good life as a freelancer, you’re going to have to learn to shrug this off. Take comfort: few of your friends or potential employers will see your name in this book, and even fewer will actually read past the acknowledgments.
    If there’s a chance the book will be reprinted, you could send the writer the errata (no need to point out whose fault they were). If the first print run is going to be the only one, I don’t see anything to gain in pointing out the book’s flaws.

Carol
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Readers: I would love to hear from you at my new Questions and Suggestions page!

Still Learning:Fun Language Words

Hanging around the Internet, you pick up some interesting lingo. Not the kind you’re probably thinking—I’m talking about the jargon you learn from linguists at sites like Language Log and Johnson.

The terms below are old news to language observers, but some I learned only recently. You will certainly recognize the phenomena they describe, but did you know what they are called?

Crash Blossom: When headlines go awry. Crash blossoms aren’t simply stupid (“Statistics Show Teen Pregnancy Drops Off Significantly after 25”) or funny (“Man Accused of Killing Lawyer Receives New Attorney”); they feature awkward phrasing that results in ambiguity: “Drunk Gets Nine Months in Violin Case” or “British Left Waffles on Falklands.”

Cupertino Effect: When you doze off and let a computer or cell phone correct your spelling. (I’m sure I don’t need to give examples—in fact, I invite you to share your own in a comment.)

Mondegreen: Misheard lyrics to a song—such as that cheerful Christian hymn “Gladly, the Cross-Eyed Bear.”

Snowclone: A variation on a popular phrase, such as “What happens in X stays in X,” or “X is the new Y.”

Spoonerism: A transposing of the initial consonants of words: I’m going to shake a tower.

Mountweasel: A fake entry in a dictionary or lexicon, or a fictitious town on a map, placed as a trap for copyright violators. I knew of this practice from a brief stint as a cartographer, but the term for it came to my attention only recently at Johnson.

And my favorite: the Shatner comma: Urban Dictionary describes these as “oddly placed commas that don’t seem to serve any actual purpose in punctuation, but make it look like you should take odd pauses, as William Shatner does when delivering lines.”

You know, exactly, what I, mean.

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Read this post and others from 2010 and 2011 in Moonlight Blogger.

 

 

Same Old, Same Old:Breaking Out of the Routine

Last week the Big Snow forced millions of us to break from routine. For some, it was a frigid nightmare of inconvenience or worse; for others (not saying who), it was an unexpected opportunity to stay home, bake scones and eat half of them, and nap in the afternoon. For still others, the snow was inconsequential: an elderly neighbor assured me she had candles in case the power failed; her condo association would shovel the walk. Her day was going to be routine.

What about your routines? Are you a creature of habit, and does that extend to your work? Is that a good thing? “Routine” has such a dead ring to it. I’d rather be a free spirit: sleep in if I please, have Twinkies and beer for dinner. But reeling through life free-form would leave chores undone and commitments forgotten. Routine is safer (and more nutritious).

A certain amount of copyediting is rote. My first mentor gave me a list of cleanup chores that I followed until it became automatic. As technology changed, my list and habits also changed, but I still always begin with a routine pass to take care of mechanical cleaning tasks. That’s good. It frees me to copyedit undistracted by double spaces or three hyphens in a row and confident that at least in many small matters the manuscript is consistently styled. Following a routine is efficient, and it ensures that no steps are omitted.

But what about the danger in routine, when it amounts to mindless automation and unfounded confidence in the results? What if we never inspect our habits for dust and decay? One of my former colleagues continued to handwrite all the type specifications on her manuscript printouts after we learned to code them electronically. Although she claimed it was “for good measure,” in fact it probably only increased the possibility of inconsistency and error.

As in most things, it’s best to have balance. Devise routines when they make sense, but revise them in response to special situations. (My routine now includes scones and naps on snow days.)

Why Don’t We Follow Directions?

If you’re expecting me to scold writers for not reading cover letters carefully, I’m going to have to disappoint you. I could do it—standing on my head—but it would be hypocritical, because when it comes to not following directions, I’m as guilty as the next perp.

Why do we ignore instructions? Maybe we’re pretty sure we already know what to do; maybe the instructions are so confusing there’s no point. Even when we do read them, they often seem to disappear into an inaccessible part of the brain labeled “Stuff you think you won’t need again.”

For whatever reason, I decided to give this issue my full attention in order to come up with some advice, and the result is a free, downloadable troubleshooting guide to following instructions. To access it, you will need the same code as your most recent incomplete online purchase coupon not only from 2010 and optional in the case of logging in.

Or just click here.