Humbled by Copyediting: Guest Post by Elizabeth Fama

 

  Photo: Elizabeth Fama

I just finished reviewing my copyedited manuscript and I learned a valuable lesson: I am a hack writer.

It has absolutely nothing to do with the copyeditor herself; she was professional and unobtrusive on the page. And before we go any further I want to say that based on her handwriting you, too, would have leaped to the conclusion that she was a woman, so don’t scold me.

Anyway, she marked the manuscript—a hard copy, which slightly horrified my friend, the Subversive Copy Editor—with clean red pencil marks, and any comments that were direct communications were business-like and friendly: things like “OK?” and “To avoid repetition.”

No, what made me feel like a hack were the corrections themselves. I’m supposed to be a writer, after all. I’m supposed to know grammar, and how to punctuate, and how to (for crying out loud) spell.

So why the heck do I use so many em-dashes? Wait, is that actually spelled m-dash? Or perhaps it’s em dash.

And why do I abuse commas so violently?

There are spaces between the periods of ellipses? Now you’re just making stuff up.

But really, how can a supposed writer not know the appropriate context for “into” versus “in,” and “onto” versus “on”? And while we’re at it, why do you hold onto a rock, but you search for something to hold on to? Why do you pull a car in to the lot, but you settle your child into bed? How the heck do foreigners learn this language?

Oh, yeah, I also abuse italics.

Another problem for me is compounding. Here are some words I would have sworn on my grandmother’s grave were made up of two words with a space between them:

swimsuit
streetlight
redbrick
ribcage
crisscross

Here are some words that I was so sure were one word, I might have staked one of my children’s lives on it:

gill net
seat belt
left overs
word play

I mean, left overs? That’s seriously two words? GET. OUT. Overs isn’t even a thing!

But there are more substantive issues, too—language I would have screwed up even if I had bothered to open Webster’s Eleventh while I was working. I once wrote a haughty blog post about tic words in young-adult books—they annoy me as a reader and keep me from feeling transported by the prose. And then I noticed little check marks on my manuscript, like snowflakes dancing down the page. It turns out those check marks appear over repeated words. Gah! I hate myself!

At the end of the whole process it was impossible for me not to wonder: did the copyeditor like the book? Did she think I was below or above average in how pathetic my mistakes were? Does she wonder whether I respect her expertise and effort?

I may never know the answer to the first two questions, but if the answer to the third is yes, I have a message for my copyeditor: hoo, boy am I ever grateful for your edits. I feel honored to have someone out there watching my back so carefully, with no recognition other than a small paycheck. Thank you for your thorough work. Thank you for cleaning up my messes. And thank you for saving my face those three times I referred to multiple anglers as “fisherman.”

P.S. Carol Saller did not copyedit this post.

~ ~ ~

Elizabeth Fama is my good friend and writing partner. Her young adult novel Monstrous Beauty (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Spring 2012) has every promise to be a blockbuster, featuring an ancient mermaid, an eighteenth-century hunk, a modern-day teenager wrestling with a family curse, and . . . well, I don’t want to give anything away before you have a chance to read the book. Meanwhile, I invited her to write about how things are going. —Carol

Comments

[John Deever]

Webster's has "leftovers" as a noun, so I think your copyeditor overstepped there.

Likewise adj. redbrick vs. adj. red modifying brick is a judgment call, as are adj.s headfirst & faceup vs. head first and face up in the above image. (Looks like headfirst was done to be consistent with your earlier usage -- one of the most important tasks of copyediting. Just saying some copyeditors would let some of that go as not technically incorrect.

[Thomasina]

I'd question her judgement on the matter of spaces between periods of ellipses. Typographically speaking, an ellipsis is a single character, so three periods would be incorrect whether you put spaces between or not. Anyone preparing your manuscript for a designer or typesetter to work with would be replacing all those instances of ". . ." or "..." with "…".

[Carol Saller]

Thomasina, Chicago style puts spaces in the ellipses, and we send them to typesetting that way. I understand that other houses do it the way you propose.

[Nancy Flynn]

I am an editor who has worked with many manuscripts over the years in similar states of “disrepair” as the one Ms. Fama humorously describes above.

I am also a writer who has taken pains to learn how to copyedit myself out of respect for those who might be editing my work. I read books like The Subversive Copy Editor. I look words up in several dictionaries if I am unsure of hyphenation or compound noun status. I regularly use CMOS to remind myself where the period goes in relation to a close parentheses, what words get capitalized in a title, whether to spell out numerals or not, and if a record album is in italics or merely a song. (In fact, I should porbably look up whether that sentence needs semi-colons instead of commas!) I even check the spelling of words on a printed copy rather than rely on an algorithm in a software program.

I recently submitted some poetry to a literary magazine that has the following as their #2 submission guideline: “We will accept only writing that has been proofread for spelling and grammar. Trust us on this one. We keep our virtual machete very sharp for people who are grammatically challenged, and we are not afraid to use it.”

These days it seems everyone is now a “writer”—and editors are even fewer and farther between. In other creative lines of work--painting, sculpting, musical composition, to name but a few--one would never expect to have someone waiting in the wings to put the necessary finishing touches on a work of art.

Perhaps it behooves those of us who put pen to paper or fingers to QWERTY keyboard to take the time to sharpen our own virtual machetes and learn some of the basic copyediting rules. It really isn’t rocket science.

[Carol Saller]

Nancy, I think the point of having copyeditors is to free writers for other tasks. I don't agree that writers should learn to copyedit themselves! Writers who worry about details at that level are doomed to crank out pedestrian prose. It's great that writers like you (and--ahem--I?) who happen to have trained as copyeditors can self-edit to a certain degree, but I don't think writers need to train as editors.

[Elizabeth Fama]

Well, it seems that even my brain needs to be edited. I just searched for the word "leftover" in my original manuscript, and the context is not a noun, as I had remembered (groan...I should have put more care into jotting down examples as I worked through the copyedits).

My original sentence, which the copyeditor correctly fixed: "He reached in and pulled out the chicken cutlets that were leftover from dinner."

I'm pretty sure that if Carol's astute readers find errors in my post that the copyeditor appeared to make, it will turn out that I misreported the "mistake" to begin with.

[Carol Saller]

Beth, stop beating yourself up. You, dear, are "the talent"!

Here at Chicago I routinely correct the spelling and grammar of PhD English professors, for pete's sake. Like all writers, they're in creative mode while writing, and they depend on copyeditors to catch the little stuff.

But I have to say I love it that in wrestling with these issues, you came to understand my world a little better.

[Elizabeth Fama]

The funny, paradoxical thing is that I'm quite interested in all the copyediting minutia, I always have been, and I'm highly detail-oriented when it comes to writing and research. I feel like I'd make a good copyeditor in another life. So it surprises me that I don't do better at it through all my revisions. On the other hand, there's research showing that most people think they're prettier than they are (relative to how others rank them), and I think I'm darned cute...

[Nancy Flynn]

Excellent points, Carol. I think I'm reeling a bit (and getting cranky about self-editing) because I've just come off editing a women's creative writing anthology where far too many of the submissions were not ready for prime time. Grammar, punctuation, and spelling errors were, sadly, the least of our editorial worries. :-)

[Carol Saller]

Nancy, I agree that there are limits! Writers should do their best to clean up manuscripts before submitting them, and we'll take it from there.

[Bradley Stock]

The important thing is that you recognise a weakness, and employ a professional to help (we do this everywhere in our everyday lives). The content is most important with writers, and that's what makes this an interesting and entertaining post. Maybe we should both enrol in Comma Over-users Anonymous.

[Kristen Stieffel]

@Nancy, I mostly agree with what you say, but I think readers are maybe more -- let's call it "diligent" -- about pointing out typos, etc., than art patrons are about things like brushstrokes. Also, visual arts are largely subjective, but verbal arts are more objective, e.g. whether "leftover" should be two words as a verb.

@Thomasina -- I'm a newspaper page designer, and we do use the ellipsis character. I have a macro for finding and replacing those, so it doesn't take any time to speak of. Like Carol said, it's a matter of house style. As long as it's done one way consistently throughout the document, it's easy to switch.

[Allyson Peltier]

Thank you for such a thoughtful, honest, and hilarious post! Besides the fact that focusing on the minutiae makes it difficult for a writer to free her creativity, you've also got biology (or is it physiology?) working against you. The fact is, we cannot be completely objective about ourselves. Our brains do certain things to help us get through the day, such as reading incorrectly spelled words as they were meant to be written, and filling in the blanks when grammar is poor or words are missing. Even the best self-editors are bound to miss errors with our brains working against us, which is why a good copyeditor's sharp, eagle eyes are so necessary!

Thank you Elizabeth for sharing and thank you Carol, as always, for a great blog.

-Ally
www.allypeltier.com

[Eli Morris-Heft]

Wow, what a treat to see one of my favorite bloggers guesting on one of my other favorite blogs! Elizabeth, your posts are always funny and humble, like excellent little stories for telling over a cup of coffee.

I have to say that I don't think I've ever seen "redbrick" as one word and I'd hyphenate "criss-cross"; conversely, "seatbelt" may have once had a space but I've seen it constantly with none, and "wordplay" is certainly without a space. (This last one I can rule on specifically, 'cause I'm a linguist and, uh, 'cause I say so, that's why!)

I can't wait until your book comes out, Elizabeth. I think I will pick up a copy for a friend and then accidentally read it first.