Writer, Editor, Helper

Shall I Drive This Writer Crazy? A Copy Editor Decides

Photo courtesy of Jonathan

Although I may have a reputation for breaking the rules, when I set out to copyedit a manuscript, my default tactic is to follow the stylebook until I have a reason not to. It’s the most sensible way to work. Since few writers are consistent in their stylings, few will object when I favor our house style and edit their departures from it accordingly.

Occasionally, however, a writer is relentlessly, reliably consistent in violating a style rule. And inevitably, I don’t notice the consistency until I’m a good way into the manuscript. After eighty or a hundred pages, it dawns on me that I’ve been changing the same thing over and over . . . and over . . . and that the writer has never once diverged from the antistyle. Which suggests that the writer really likes it the way they wrote it.

What to do?

Why Your Printed Book Isn’t an E-Book (Yet)

  Photo courtesy of ginnarobot

If you have recently published with an academic press, or if your book is in press now, you might have been disappointed to learn that your work won’t be available on your e-reader anytime soon. While novelists take for granted that their new books will appear in all the electronic formats simultaneously with print publication, for scholars there are no such assurances. Why?

The answers fall into three main areas: (1) technology, (2) rights, and (3) money.

Submitting Digital Art for Publication: Advice From an Art Director

If your book or journal article has scanned illustrations—whether photographs, charts, or drawings—your publisher is going to require that they meet a certain standard. Something writers don’t always realize is that art that works perfectly well as an e-mail attachment or an online posting may flunk the test for print publication.

Jill Shimabukuro, director of design and production at the University of Chicago Press, kindly agreed to answer some questions for Lingua Franca about the most common problems with submitted art.

Losing Is for Losers: It’s Easier Than Ever to Back Up Your Work

 

Backing up computer files is like flossing—we know we should do it every day, but even though it’s fast and easy, we procrastinate. It’s easy to skip it “just once.” Many of us have lost work that wasn’t backed up: We save an old version over the new one; our laptop is stolen along with the backup thumb drive plugged into it; we forget to save in the first place, and just when we’re getting ready to, one of the kids—the one who plays bass in a rock band—plugs his 200-watt amplifier into the electric circuit that includes the clothes dryer and the basement office computer. (Not that any of that has happened to me.)