Writer, Editor, Helper

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.

A Would-Be Anthropologist Looks at Trucker Lingo

Recently my brother let me ride with him for a week of long-haul trucking in his eighteen-wheeler. Who hasn’t ever wanted to do that? It’s been a dream of mine from the time I was little and was thrilled by The Big Red Pajama Wagon, by Mary Elting, in which pretty much nothing happens but which thrilled me anyway.

A week in which nothing happens is the trucker’s goal, it turns out. And Tom is a relative novice, having taken up trucking a few months ago after twenty years of teaching high school math. He’s learned that a great week is when you don’t back over a street light, pick up the wrong load, or nearly flatten a sports car that brakes in front of your 50,000 pounds doing 60 mph.

Can You Read This? (or, Is Cursive Dead Yet?)

 

 

As far back as the early 1990s, I thought that any school curriculum lacking instruction in typing was shortsighted. Had I been asked to jettison cursive writing to make room for keyboarding, however, I would have been surprised and doubtful. But today that is exactly what has happened in many elementary-school classrooms. Already, we hear, there are high-school and college students who when asked to read memos in longhand might as well be asked to read Linear B.

Typographic Book Covers

In a recent post about the timing of cover design in the publication process, I mentioned a colleague’s comment that typographic covers have the potential to wow just as much as those that feature a photograph or other illustrative art. To learn more, I put some questions to some design and marketing professionals.

Will Your Citations Pass or Fail?

Photo by Manuel Bahamondez H

When an academic book manuscript is under contract and comes to my department for copyediting, it undergoes an initial review by the assistant managing editor (yours truly) before assignment. If I find any major problems, I send the manuscript back to the acquiring editor, who returns it to the author for what is probably not the first round of revision but is hopefully* the last.

Things have to be pretty awful for that to happen. After all, copyeditors expect to do a lot of cleaning up; it’s our job to sort out problems, both written (renumbering figures, correcting totals in table columns, realphabetizing bibliographies, editing notes to a consistent style, conforming tables of contents to the actual contents) and electronic (removing formats, combining or separating files, adding paragraph indents, removing hot links, taking out extra spaces and tabs).

I’ve written before about standard citation styles and the reasons for observing them. Today I’ll give examples of some notes and bibliographies that have passed muster and some that haven’t.

When Can I See My Book Cover?

 

My walk to work takes me down a charming 1890s street that is under constant renewal, and over the years I’ve enjoyed watching the restoration of several frame cottages and a couple of large Victorian beauties. Yesterday I stopped to watch some workers tear off a roof, and I wondered why it was being done several months into the rehab instead of at the beginning. Does that mean water was leaking all this time into the new interior? Maybe someone can enlighten me.

In any case, it reminded me of a question I get from nearly every writer early in the process of publishing a book, sometimes before the manuscript is even edited: When will I see the book cover?

Book Indexing, Part 3: Tips for Do-It-Yourselfers

 

Image by Hans Gerhard Meier

If after reading part 1 and part 2 of this series you’ve decided that a computer isn’t competent to index your book and that hiring a professional isn’t an option, and if you’ve never written an index before, you might appreciate some advice. Here are some answers to questions I frequently hear from writers contemplating the DIY solution.

Book Indexing, Part 2: Infinite Loops and Easter Eggs

                       Easter Eggs, by Philip Dean, courtesy of Flickr

Last week when I listed various reasons why you should not allow a computer to write the index for your monograph, I failed to mention one: That is, you might want to do it yourself because it’s potentially a lot of fun.

I say “potentially” because it is also potentially infuriating, but never mind that for now. Today we’re all about fun.

Book Indexing, Part 1: Is a Computer the Right Person for the Job?

Photo by Calsidyrose, courtesy Wikimedia Commons

In short, no.

Back-of-the-book indexing is much misunderstood, which I know from having to argue at cocktail parties that it cannot be done adequately, let alone well, by a computer. (Yes, unfortunately, that’s what passes for cocktail-party banter in my neighborhood.)

By Ear or by Eye

 

Photo by Enokson, courtesy of Flickr

When I hang out with writers or editors, conversation inevitably touches on working with music in the background. There are always listeners and nonlisteners, but the most passionate are those who never work while listening. I think I understand—they read and write “by ear,” so their “music” is on the page; additional music clashes and distracts. Those who work more visually, on the other hand, can afford to add a music track. They might listen or not; it’s optional.

When the Book Is Too Big: Are Online Supplements a Good Idea?

 

A l’entrée de la Bibliothèque Méjanes, by marlenedd, courtesy of Flickr

In book publishing, each project begins with a financial projection that takes into account everything that affects costs and revenues: the number of words and illustrations in the manuscript, author royalties, subventions from financing bodies, printing costs, estimated sales, and so on. The trick is to juggle all these data until the math adds up to at least the minimum acceptable profit.

Repetition Redux

                                  Photo by Rusty Clark, courtesy of Flickr

The other day, my colleague Ben Yagoda wrote about “elegant variation”—that is, the way writers sometimes strain to avoid the repeated use of a mundane word. He had fun with the colorful terms invented by sports writers in particular. It’s clear to me, however, that all kinds of writers feel the compulsion to avoid repeating words when they write.

Forewords, Prefaces, and Introductions: Where to Begin?

 

   Preface image by Efeikiss, courtesy of Flickr

Grab the nearest monograph from your shelf and turn the first pages: half-title page, series page, title page, copyright page, dedication, table of contents . . . then what? Almost certainly not chapter 1.

It’s a rare work that presents itself without preamble, because an academic work is always part of a longer journey through a discipline. Scholars have a lot of baggage, and they like to unpack up front the story of the research: what inspired it, how it was nurtured by mentors, colleagues, and foundations, and where it fits into the history of its discipline.

So where to start? The terms foreword, preface (from Latin praefatio, “speech before”), and introduction (from Latin introducere, “to lead in”) all seem to be saying “Me first.” But each has a particular meaning in book publishing—allowing for a fair bit of overlap—and there is a traditional order for presenting them.

Are You a Difficult Writer?

 

Of Flames and Shadows, by Markus Röncke

Difficult writers and difficult people tend to share some characteristics; you might already know whether you are one or not. If you feel that being difficult is something you do well and rather enjoy, then carry on. Otherwise, here is a bit of self-examination and amateur therapy.

Citing a Tweet (It’s Not Just for Twits)

 

Icons by Dryicons.com

There was online chatter recently when the Modern Language Association posted its style for citing a tweet. This didn’t surprise me. What surprised me was the amount of backlash from commenters who are still shocked at the idea of Twitter as a legitimate source of information for scholars; who cling to the idea that Twitter data consists only of what millions of users ate for breakfast; who not only choose to remain stubbornly ignorant of the technology, but are willing to boast of it in public.

Tsk.

Old-Style Versus Lining Figures

 

Image by Duval Guillaume

Something you might or might not notice when you read a book or journal article is the style of any numerals that turn up in the text. If you don’t notice, that’s a good thing, and it is probably thanks to a professional graphic designer who put some thought into specifying the right style for that text.

When Style and Grammar Rules Elude You

Photo by Spencer Ritenour

Few things are as annoying as not being able to find something, especially when it was within sight only moments ago. But at least in most cases you know what you’re looking for—keys, dog, car—and you’re pretty sure it exists.

Searching for a style or grammar rule can be tougher. You don’t always know whether there actually is one, much less what it’s called, and those are serious impediments to figuring out where it might be hiding. In years of reading questions e-mailed to the Chicago Manual of Style's Online Q&A, I’ve surmised a few reasons why writers can’t find a rule, and some strategies for bringing one to bay.

So why can’t these readers find what they’re looking for?

Which Shortening Is Best? Ibid., Op. Cit., Loc. Cit., Etc.

 

Photo by Phil Dokas

Although I have complained about the misuse of citation software, it’s not as though I believe the quaint and perhaps dying method of hand-composing citations to be a cure-all. At least the software mangles the format consistently, which allows a copyeditor to put certain gaffes right by means of global searches.

In contrast, when homemade notes fail to follow a system, they fail in myriad ways, so any editor determined to impose order is faced with endless drudgery. Recently a group of academic book manuscript editors I belong to discussed one particular aspect of notes preparation: whether and how to standardize the shortening of citations after their first, full mention.