Writer, Editor, Helper

Too Many Eyes: When Editing Is Second-Guessed

          Photo courtesy Alaina Abplanalp Photography

Goodness knows my projects always benefit from another pass with a competent pair of eyes. They often get one during proofreading, and it’s humbling to see the things I missed or flubbed. In the end I’m glad for the sake of the book that the errors were caught before they made it into print. But when readers are misguided and aggressive, I can’t help but resent the time it takes to undo their work and justify my own editing to the writer.

I know this happens to copyeditors all the time. One young freelancer wrote to me in a panic: an author whose work she had edited had given the final copy to a friend, who had found many “errors and incompetencies,” and as a result the author proposed paying only half the freelancer’s fee. The author had attached a list of alleged transgressions, which the freelancer forwarded to me.

The problem was, almost nothing on the list was an actual error. “Please see the attached document with my friend’s tracked changes,” wrote the author. “There are more then 30 corrections, and while some of them are small things like extra or missing commas, there are major grammar mistakes such as: (a) curriculums (must be curricula—there is no English word curriculums, as he pointed to me) (b) the nominee’s students’ works (must be the nominee’s students’ work) . . . ,” and on it went.

I myself have been the victim of second readings twice recently. In each case, there was a long list of “errors,” some of which were—I’m not too fancy to admit—errors. But the majority of my so-called mistakes were not. Rather, these readers wanted to add hyphens where they weren’t needed (two years old, a quarter century, thickly treed), change correctly broken words at the ends of lines (qua-druple, geog-raphy), and uppercase words against our house style (president, army).

It was clear that the after-readers were not experienced or trained editors. They knew little about copyediting conventions, much less Chicago style. Frequently they marked a change in one place and failed to notice that for consistency they should have marked it throughout. And yet they didn’t doubt for a minute (and the author was quick to believe) that they knew better than the copyeditor.

So here’s my advice for writers who solicit another reading:

—You’re entitled, and it’s a good idea. No copyeditor is going to catch every last error in your work.

—Realize that although your reader may have three PhDs, that doesn’t mean she knows whether your publisher capitalizes the queen or spells out thirty-seven.

—Sending your copyeditor another list of errors will cost her time (= money), and it isn’t fair to send a lot of bogus errors you didn’t vet. So . . .

—Look over your reader’s list of errors carefully and check them against the style sheet your copyeditor sent you, and if possible, against the recommended dictionary or style manual. At the very least, check them against whatever dictionary you have at hand.

—If your reader flags a change to something you know appears more than once in your work, find the other locations and add them to the list.

And advice for editors who receive additional errata from a postediting read:

—Although you may feel defensive, don’t blame the writer, who only wants the best result possible.

—If the second reader and the writer favor a change that doesn’t wreak havoc, swallow your pride and go with it.

—Resist the temptation to respond to every item on the list with reasons and arguments. Instead, apologize for errors, explain that other issues are a matter of house style, and reject only the corrections you feel you must.

—If you are forced to defend yourself to a supervisor, welcome the review of your work. Remember that it speaks for itself, and don’t freak out with a barrage of explanations.

—Make a habit of sending the writer a copy of your style sheet, and include mention of the dictionary and style manual you follow.

 

Help Me Understand My Copy Editor, Part II

[Today Lucy Ferriss and I continue a conversation we started on Wednesday about why copyeditors do the things they do.]

Lucy: What is with the love of italics? Again, this peeve applies mostly to the personal essay or fiction. If the internal monologue or remembered bit of conversation is clearly designated as such, I prefer to keep it in roman. All that italic makes me feels as though people are either whispering or shouting. I see increasing amounts of italic for imagined conversations, what a character wishes he’d said, and so on. Is this a new guideline? Or is it more often something you see authors doing, rather than editors?

Carol: In my experience, it’s more authors than editors. Editors are taught to avoid the use of italics, both for emphasis (a sign of hack writing) and for text (which is hard on the eye). But authors love italics! I’m constantly removing italics used for stress, for internal dialogue, and even for entire block quotations. Chicago style uses quotation marks for long quotations of foreign languages, but writers often use both quotation marks and italics.

Lucy: Must we keep capitalizing words like Internet, Linoleum, and Dumpster? When do we get to decide they’re become generic? Changing these to proper names introduces a distraction, in my view. And who decides that, for instance, in speaking of Catholics, Masses is capped whereas sisters is lower case?

Carol: Publishers might claim that there are legal issues that dictate uppercasing trademarks, but ultimately one’s style manual or house dictionary determines capitalization. I know it’s frustrating and difficult to understand the reasoning behind the styles listed in a manual—often because there isn’t any. In fact, you’ll find considerable disagreement between guides. If two styles are equally valid, the writers of a style guide have to choose arbitrarily, and once a particular style is codified it tends to perpetuate itself (at least until the next edition). But any editor worth her salt will cooperate when a writer objects in a given instance. It’s easy enough to search a manuscript to lowercase a word—unless the editor has lowercased something like he used for God.

Lucy: My second novel appeared with an embarrassing, though sidelong, reference to there being tigers in Africa. I got plenty of ribbing about the fact that the only tigers in Africa would be found in zoos. Stupid me, of course, but after I’d been teased a dozen times for my blooper, I started blaming the copyeditor. After all, aren’t writers supposed to be the brilliant inventors, and copyeditors the dull safety nets? All kidding aside, how much, if any, responsibility do you think the copyeditor should accept for a gaffe like that?

Carol: It depends. When a copyeditor takes a job, the hiring party is supposed to make clear whether fact-checking is expected. Most often, it isn’t. It’s possible that your editor was technically responsible only for making sure that Africa was spelled correctly. On the other hand, most copyeditors find it hard to resist checking facts—it’s so darned easy, and so gratifying to find errors. What’s more, the line between editing and fact-checking is easily blurred: If I’m checking the spelling of the Wrights’ first plane, the Kitty Hawk, I’m going to find out willy-nilly that Kitty Hawk was actually the town where the plane (which was named the Wright Flyer) was tested. In the case of the tiger goof, I hope the copyeditor was mortified not to have caught it, because it’s common knowledge, even if it checking it wasn’t part of the job.

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A version of this post originally appeared at Lingua Franca, a Chronicle of Higher Education blog, on July 13, 2012. More reader comments are available there.

Help Me Understand My Copy Editor, Part I

[In conversation with author Lucy Ferriss]

For some days now, my Lingua Franca colleague Carol Saller and I have been exchanging queries on the productive but sometimes perplexing relationship between writers and their copyeditors. Below are some of the fruits of our exchange. Carol’s post, on Friday, will feature the second half of this dialogue. I hasten to add, before we launch into the Q&A, that I have often been blessed with the kindest, smartest, most discerning, and least condescending copyeditors in the universe. They have saved me from myself more often than not, and I owe them my enduring gratitude. I have not been lucky enough to be edited by Carol—yet—but her answers here suggest that her authors struck gold. We hope that this exchange is fruitful not just for us but for you, our readers.

Lucy: Hyphens and two-word nouns seem to be going the way of the dodo bird. In a twenty-page stretch, my copyeditor rendered back yard into backyard, bird cage into birdcage, picnic ware into picnicware, mud room into mudroom, family-planning notions into family planning notions, high-school chum into high school chum, re-jigger into rejigger, semi-circle into semicircle. Mostly I don’t care, but if I’ve been consistent, why should my usage be overruled?

Carol: I have two answers. First, it’s a rare writer who is consistent in styling these words throughout a long article or book, and copyeditors don’t want to have to record each one on a style sheet just in case we meet the same compound a hundred pages later. Instead, we edit according to house style on the assumption that the end result will be more consistent than the original was. Second, in following a style manual, your editor probably doesn’t care about those compounds any more than you do. Your use of the word overruled betrays the slightest hint of “Why does she get to be right?” It might help to know that your copyeditor doesn’t think you’re wrong and might even personally prefer the forms you used.

Lucy: What sort of sensitivity can I expect a copyeditor to have to nonstandard syntax, particularly when it’s meant to convey character? For instance, I describe a hotel clerk’s appearance so as to suggest he’s South Asian, and I observe that he speaks with an accent. Then I have him say, in response to a wayward kid who asks for a receipt, “You are entrepreneur now?” The copyeditor changes the line to “You’re an entrepreneur now?” Not difficult to change back, but why doesn’t she query before changing?

Carol: Your copyeditor’s change certainly was insensitive (to borrow your euphemism), but as long as the editing was visible—that is, you could see both the original and the new version—it was the equivalent of a query. Most copyeditors note in a cover letter that all editing is negotiable, and that if you don’t like a change, you should stet it or rewrite it.

Lucy: Is there a profound hatred of comma splices among copyeditors? I sometimes like to push parataxis, e.g., “He couldn’t walk any farther, he was wiped out.” I find copyeditors tend to replace the comma with a colon, a piece of punctuation that to me, in the personal essay or in fiction, is practically anathema.

Carol: Hatred? No! Maybe. OK, yes. I’ve been struggling with this myself, having read about increasing acceptance of splices. In fiction, of course, they are old news, and a copyeditor should respect them and edit only when they cause problems. In scholarly writing, however, they are still considered substandard. I love semicolons. I just counted: There are ninety-eight in The Subversive Copy Editor. But it’s interesting that in my young adult novel Eddie’s War there are only sixteen, and comma splices are rampant.

I love semicolons too, a secret love to which the young writer Ben Dolnick recently confessed in The New York Times. Just for fun, I’ll put one here; if it disappears, you’ll know which way the editing wind is blowing.

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A version of this post originally appeared at Lingua Franca, a Chronicle of Higher Education blog, on July 11, 2012. More reader comments are available there.

The Top 10 Edits to Academic Book Manuscripts

Photo: Martin Thomas

Even after a well-written and well-prepared book has made it past an acquiring editor and through peer review, there is plenty for a manuscript editor to do.

I’ve written perhaps too much already about the trials of editing footnotes and bibliographies, so this time I’ll set those parts of the manuscript aside. Here are the issues my colleagues and I spend the most time on in the main text, in reverse order of how much labor they require.

10. Spacing. Although unwanted spaces are surely the most pervasive blemish, I spend little time fixing them, because my cleanup macro does it for me. In one go, the macro eliminates thousands of spaces before and after hard returns and dashes, spaces between paragraphs, double spaces after a period, and line spaces at the ends of chapters. (Writers commonly put dozens of hard returns after the end of a chapter’s last paragraph, I suppose because they don’t know how to start a new page. I’m told that conversion from another word-processing application also can produce such oddities.)

9. Formats. All the hours and hours a writer puts into choosing pretty fonts and dingbats, putting text into columns, and decorating chapter titles with 14-point bold script: Zap! Gone in a few strokes.

8. Punctuation at the end of quotations. Again, the cleanup macro moves commas and periods inside the quotation marks where they belong (in American-style punctuation), which is a good thing, because otherwise I would look for another job.

In actual hands-on editing:

7. Disagreement with an antecedent. In complex sentences, a subject that’s several lines away from its verb can morph in the writer’s memory into a plural, especially if parentheticals pile up in between. Similarly, pronouns sometimes fail to match the referent and its verb, especially when a collective noun is involved: “The restaurant continues to advertise their cupcakes.”

6. Constructions that aren’t parallel. This usually happens when the writer puts neither or not only before a verb, and then fails to supply a verb for the matching nor or but also: “The investigation could neither account for the missing cupcakes nor for the fact that there was a secret door in the back of the manager’s office.” Some readers can skim right past a sentence like that; others will shudder and check the spine to see who published the book.

5. Capitalization. Most frequently I find unwanted caps in job titles (pope, queen, president, dean, professor of political science) and academic disciplines (a humanities major), but they also pop up other kinds of words and terms (century, army, chess, chapter 2). Note that The Chicago Manual of Style, which I use, promotes a down style, lowercasing terms that other houses cap.

4. Numbers. Comprehending a paragraph full of numbers is challenging enough without having to cope with variation in styling (77 or seventy-seven) or punctuation (1023 or 1,023) or the styling of ranges (113–4 or 113–14 or 113–114).

3. Danglers and misplaced phrases. Although most of my writers avoid the obviously hilarious (“At a South Side bar they shoot each foreigner passing through the doorway cold, appraising looks”), their long, complex sentences sometimes take a wrong turn. Dangling is often the most efficient way to say something; thoughtful rewriting is labor-intensive, hence its place on the list.

2. Compound words/words with prefixes. Copyeditors keep busy adjusting hyphens and spaces in compounds (long jump, long-term, longtime) and removing hyphens after prefixes (coworker, postwar, anti-intellectual).

And finally, the most common copyedit:

1. Commas. I like commas and tolerate them more than most. (I would have put one in the last sentence if I’d thought it could survive the copyeditor.) But few writers pay attention to their use of commas, and in the typical manuscript they appear across the page like ash from a cigarette, falling where they may. Even with my policy of adding or deleting commas only when they offend a popular rule or endanger intelligibility, that is a great deal of the time.

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A version of this post originally appeared at Lingua Franca, a Chronicle of Higher Education blog, on July 5, 2012. More reader comments are available there.