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.

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?

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.

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.