Castle Walls Editing

Tag: editing

  • Mind the Gap

    Looking at the spaces between vertical railings on my friend’s just-built deck, I could only say, “This can’t adhere to any code.” The spaces were a good two feet apart, so any child under the age of six could easily walk right off the deck.

    Needless to say, my friend had words with her contractor.

    The existing railing might even have been worse than no railing at all, because the illusion of safety might have given a false sense of security, whereas if there were no railing whatsoever, people (presumably even children) would be afraid to go near the edge.

    Editing can be like that.

    I’ve noticed that the more professional the design, whether that means typesetting of the text or pictorial or illustrative elements surrounding the text, the more likely the editor is to have a false sense that everything is okay.

    It rarely is.

    I’ve seen good editors miss what should be obvious mistakes on book covers in part, I have to think, because the design looks so nice that it’s hard to believe there could be an error.

    A corollary is that editors can easily fail to fact-check something because of the thought that the writer intended a piece of information to be there and must know what he or she is talking about.

    Trust in editing is a dangerous thing, while skepticism more often than not saves the day.

    But editors should be skeptical of their own impulses as well. Before making any change, editors have to counter the little thrill of making a correction by asking themselves whether there’s any way that the original instance could in fact be correct. Young editors especially can be so fired up with confidence in their abilities that they introduce errors by misreading a usage and making a bad edit.

    So we have to always be skeptical of the text, of our writers, and, perhaps most particularly, of ourselves. As always, do no harm!

    And don’t go stepping off any decks, metaphorical ones or otherwise.  

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  • Nobody Move, Nobody Get Hurt

    People love to correct other people’s grammar, spelling, and usage. What better way to establish superiority or to discredit someone’s argument! And that’s what it’s about, isn’t it? Feeling superior. Or more educated. Or just better. Never mind that a person’s opinion on a matter isn’t more or less valid because that person used an apostrophe improperly or didn’t recognize a difference between eager and anxious.

    I edit for a living. I spend most of my days trying to bring out the best in the text before me, but that doesn’t mean I’m rude. An editor can’t stop editing. Try going to a restaurant with one and see if he or she doesn’t point out a spelling error on the menu. That’s worlds different, though, from correcting someone’s speech, online or off, in a shameless attempt to pat oneself on the back.

    I believe that most people who obnoxiously correct another’s grammar don’t really care about the language but are simply grasping onto a means to run another down, but for people who do care about the language, I’d recommend John McWhorter’s Words on the Move: Why English Won’t—and Can’t—Sit Still (Like, Literally). (And I apologize for the long lead-in/rant.)

    In Words on the Move, McWhorter examines how language has changed through time. He shows readers how it is changing now and why it will always change, and he makes a convincing argument that this is a good thing.

    Still, language change is not going to go down easy for people who cringe when they hear someone say, “What’s the ask?” But even so, McWhorter at least reveals the mechanics behind inexplicable, or seemingly wrong, usages. Does pronouncing nuclear in a certain way (we’re looking at you, President Bush) make at least a little more sense if we understand that that pronunciation has been influenced by words such as spectacular and circular (that is, that an already existing pattern of word formation has resulted in an improper pronunciation)? Perhaps, perhaps not, but it does provide a fuller picture.

    Elsewhere, McWhorter talks about the Great Vowel Shift and shifts in pronunciation today, the oddness of the phrase “used to,” grammaticalization (great word!), and backshift, which explains why compound words like supermarket are pronounced superMARKET when new and SUPERmarket when their newness wears off.

    I understand that it feels good to rail against the way kids speak these days, but Words on the Move provides background and understanding that might make some hold their tongues.

  • Change Is Good (Sometimes)

    Editors pore over text, moving from letter to letter, even looking for extra spaces and judging whether punctuation marks should be italic or roman.

    Yes, an editor’s work might seem tedious, but then—BAM!—an editor finds an error and feels an undeniable charge. Editors might not pump their fists like tennis players winning a big point, but there’s a joy there. It’s one of the rewards of the profession.

    That joy, though, shouldn’t influence whether an edit is actually made.

    Every editor on the planet has probably heard that the first rule of editing is to “do no harm.” Good advice. There’s no greater sin in editing than introducing an error into the text. I don’t want to miss anything, ever, but I can forgive myself for that. I can’t forgive myself, however, for introducing an error because I’m too busy patting myself on the back to realize that a change shouldn’t have been made in the first place.

    So once the thrill of finding what appears to be an error has passed, an editor should settle down and ask a number of questions.

    • Is it wrong? A misspelled name is wrong. A subject that doesn’t agree with its verb is wrong. But there are plenty of changes editors would like to make that have nothing to do with the supposed error being right or wrong. All editors have preferences, and some editors feel that their preferences are a reflection of who they are. Serial commas rule! or Down with serial commas! Either attitude is fine, and when editors have a choice, hey, by all means, they should follow their preference. But if you’re editing for someone who follows the Chicago Manual, then you use the serial comma, and if you’re editing for someone who follows AP, then you generally won’t. The point is that preferences over style should be put aside both for client and for audience.
    • Could it be correct if looked at from another angle? Sometimes we’re so sure that something is wrong that we don’t step back and ask whether there’s something we haven’t considered. Yes, that noun is singular and it’s linked to a plural verb. But have you considered that it’s a collective noun and the sense is that the members of that collective are acting individually and not as a whole? Editors should also try to look things up even when they are sure. (How many people are sure that just deserts should be just desserts?)
    • Should I make this edit? Does the edit go beyond the scope of my assignment? Yes, it’s a dangling modifier, but fixing it would mean radically restructuring the sentence. Maybe that’s something I should query before doing any rewriting.   
    • Does it affect other areas of the text? If I decide to write out the number eight and numerals have been used for numbers under ten throughout the document, then I’ve introduced an error where none existed before. What else could be affected by the change I’ve made?

    The Halo Effect

    Editors also have to consider the halo effect (missing another error close to the error that’s just been corrected). When an editor corrects an error, there’s a feeling that all is well, and that often extends to a few words before and after the error. You don’t want to fix the spelling of the subject and miss that the subject doesn’t agree with the verb. The best way to deal with the halo effect is to back up to the previous sentence and reread the portion of text again.

  • Rules of the Road

    I received a traffic warning last week for rolling through a stop sign. (And thank you, Officer, for not giving me a ticket.) While we all hate to make mistakes, we also know that we never edit better than right after being smacked in the face with something we’ve missed. These reminders keep us sharp, whether or not we get fined or have points put on our license.

    It’s been nearly three decades since I took my driver’s exam (in a little white 1980s-style Honda Civic), but here are a few rules of the road that I try to keep in mind while editing.

    Slow Down!

    In editing, speed kills. If you’re speeding through text, then you’re not doing your job. Read letter by letter, and train your eye to pass over every character.

    Look Both Ways Before Pulling Out into Traffic—Then Look Again

    When you’ve finished a job, even if it’s just a one-page flyer, take a deep breath and look it over once more. Second and third looks often turn up something you’ve missed. Remember that the people telling you to rush through a job are the same people who will call you out for any mistakes that go through.

    Know the Law

    Whether you’ve been editing for five minutes or fifty years, there is always something new to learn, and styles are in constant flux. Consult your resources, follow language blogs, and read all the books you can on grammar, style, and usage.

    Don’t Be Afraid to Ask for Directions

    In truth, there are few “rules” in editing, and the longer you edit, the more you realize how few absolutes there actually are. It’s all about consensus. Consult with fellow editors every chance you get.

    Stop at Rest Areas

    The real challenge in editing lies in staying sharp job after job, hour after hour, minute after minute. When fatigue sets in, the best editors can miss obvious errors. Take frequent five-minute breaks to refresh your mind. Spend a few moments looking out the nearest window to give your eyes a much-needed rest.

  • Trust (Vroom, Vroom)

    The mechanic sat down next to me and presented the sheet detailing the work to be performed on my vehicle. Because I needed to authorize the repairs, and by extension the king’s ransom the work required, I pretended to examine this sheet. For all I understood about what the man was saying, however, I might as well have been mentally reviewing a long-ago game of Donkey Kong.

    If I were being honest, I would have said, “Sir, you’re describing something I could never hope to understand. I’m going to do my best to look distressed so you’ll take pity on me and charge a fair price for the work, but I’m completely at your mercy, and in the end I’m going to agree to whatever it is you suggest.”

    In turn, if the mechanic were being honest, he would have said, “I understand the situation. I know you don’t have the foggiest notion of what I’m talking about, and I know that you know that I know. I’ll charge you whatever I please, and then when I’m done I’ll pretend to knock a little off the top as if I’m doing you a favor. But in truth, you’ll never really know the extent to which you’re being screwed.”

    Fair enough, my good man.

    My problem at the auto shop was twofold: First, I’m a car idiot, which is entirely my fault. With more than (or “over,” as I can now say with the full blessing of the Associated Press) forty years on this planet, I’ve had plenty of time to educate myself on the inner workings of one of the most important machines in my life. So that’s on me.

    The second issue, though, is trust. There are good mechanics and bad mechanics, honest ones and dishonest ones. The mechanic working on my car seemed like a nice guy, but when you’re scratching to make ends meet, feelings of distrust have a way of asserting themselves.

    Trust, too, is just as much a consideration when editing a job for a client. The client is, after all, placing something in my hands that’s every bit as precious to him or her as the sleekest car. When clients entrust you with their work, they’re handing over their baby, and you better believe they can be fussy as hell about it. And they have a right to be.

    Money in the bank is greatly appreciated. It can be used to pay for things like, well, car repairs. But earning the trust of a client is also a form of payment, and it’s a deeply satisfying one.

    Now that I think about it, editing a manuscript isn’t all that different from working on a vehicle. I can take a manuscript into my garage and put the hood up and listen to the sound of the engine. I can gauge whether it runs smoothly, corners nicely, or if it sputters and fails.

    I can emerge from the garage and look the client in the eye and perhaps see the same level of apprehension I felt at the mechanic’s when I say, “I gotta tell ya, we need to do some serious work here.”

    I’d wipe the grease off my hands with a rag and continue, “That knocking you heard in your manuscript? It’s a combination of dangling participles, noun-pronoun antecedent issues, comma splices. Your punctuation’s out of whack. You’ve got some serious usage issues. Yes, sir, I’m going to have to take those paragraphs completely apart and put ’em all back together again. We’re talking a full week in the shop.”

    In reality, when taking on freelance work, I’m more likely to undercharge clients than to overcharge them. I enjoy editing and I enjoy helping others, probably in part because I’ve always had low self-esteem. But that’s another issue entirely.

    The real issue is trust, and in a good writer-editor relationship, the writer trusts the editor to bring out the best in his or her manuscript, to be strong in his opinions, and to respect the writer’s right to disagree. And when the work is done, the best feeling in the world is seeing the writer continue his journey with a manuscript that purrs like a kitten.

  • Space, the Final Frontier

    Thinkforamomentabouthowmarvelouslyusefulspacesbetweenwordsare.

    Or rather: Think for a moment about how marvelously useful spaces between words are. And cheers to that big triple-em-dash-looking thing on our keyboard: the space bar.

    Without spaces, sentences are all but unreadable, and so conditioned are we to using spaces that I could not write that first sentence without them. I tried, but damned if my thumb didn’t automatically hit the space bar after every word. I almost immediately abandoned the attempt and simply typed the sentence normally and then went back and deleted the spaces.

    (Latin did not employ spaces between words until sometime around 700 CE. Sales of the Aeneid must have skyrocketed.)

    Good editors naturally develop the ability to spot extra spaces between words and sentences. Once you’ve honed this ability, an extra space will send up the same mental red flag as a misspelled word. Whether you know it or not, you’re already reading every space as a type of character, so the groundwork for developing this skill is already in place.

    I imagine someone is about to slam down a fist and cry out, ”Let’s just be clear that there should be one space between sentences!” Or: “You’re crazy! There have always been two spaces after the period!”

    Needless to say, you’ll still hear arguments about whether there should be one space or two after the period. In short, the use of two spaces after the period was a common typewriter convention. Typewriter fonts used monospace typefaces and the two spaces helped readers recognize the break between sentences. Modern fonts use proportional typefaces and one space is usually preferred, unless otherwise specified by a house style. There’s no need to get upset, and those of a confrontational bent can go back to arguing about the Oxford comma.

    No matter how practiced you become at recognizing extra spaces in text, it’s always good to use all the tools at our disposal, and the Find/Replace feature on most programs is a helpful aid.

    Simply type two spaces into the Find field and let the machine do its work. You can type one space into the Replace field and fix issues one at a time as the Find/Replace feature takes you through the document. You can also run a Replace All, but if doing so, be sure that there aren’t places in the document where a run of spaces hasn’t been used for another purpose.

    If you are using Find/Replace to ensure one space after the period, be sure to run it again and again until it comes up with no hits. If there are instances of two spaces after the period, there’s a good chance that there will also be instances of three or more spaces as well, and running the cycle multiple times ensures you catch all of these.

    To sum up: Space is a good thing, but too much can cause problems. Sounds a bit like relationship advice, doesn’t it? But then there are any number of ways editing extends beyond the page. And perhaps that’s something for another post.

  • Now I’m Lookin’ at a Flashback Sunday

    Quite some time ago, I was critiquing catalog write-ups, some of which I’d written, in a roomful of writers and marketers. A particular piece contained a phrase that read something like this: “A tale where such and such . . .” I made the suggestion that we change “where” to “in which.”

    One of the people in the room smirked and said, “So you’re an ‘in which’ guy.”

    Freeze-frame.

    I don’t recall my response, but I remember being taken aback. Like most people, I don’t cotton* to those who assume things about me and smugly cast me as a certain type. The implication was worse than that I didn’t know a specific grammar point. The implication was that there was a rule governing a usage and that I was blindly following that rule, even if a less formal usage would have been perfectly suitable, and maybe even preferred, in the context.

    To set your mind at ease, this film does not resume with me turning that room into The Wild Bunch. The comment did stick with me, though, most likely because I’m sensitive to how I’m perceived. It’s bad to be thought incompetent, but it’s far worse to be thought ridiculous, and I like to think of myself as the opposite of someone who mindlessly enforces rules across all situations, no matter the appropriateness.

    Intermission.

    I’d meant this blog post to be about the attitude one takes toward grammar, and I had thought to compare that attitude to one that a person might take toward politics. I was going to levy charges against marrying oneself to a viewpoint, whether it be right, left, prescriptivist, or descriptivist. I meant to talk about my self-loathing in regard to the scornful “reasonable” view. I was even going to talk about free will, but all that will have to wait for another post. I’ve realized that this post (admittedly a self-serving one in many ways) is about something more basic: why one edits.

    Return to the Theatre.

    Many years ago, my office mates and I were charged with assembling going-away gifts for a colleague named Lars, who was leaving our group to strike out on his own. Someone in the office (an accountant, not an editor, mind you) had decorated and labeled a container as “Lars’ Jar.” I don’t remember what was to go in the jar, but it was likely to be filled with well-wishing notes or something of the like.

    One of my other coworkers, fancying herself a grammar guru, made a showy display of hand-wringing over her contention that it should be written “Lars’s Jar.” She was sorely aggrieved that anyone who saw the jar would assume that Lars, in essence, had worked with a group of slack-jawed yokels, presumably because it was such an eye-poppingly huge punctuation gaffe.

    First things [deleted] last: The manner of forming the possessive of a singular noun ending in s is a style decision. Chicago recommends apostrophe-s, while Associated Press style, for instance, recommends the apostrophe alone (saving even a single space in a newspaper column can be a big deal). But even if it were something as uncontestable as misusing “its” for “it’s,” longtime fans of Steven Goff’s informative soccer blog would recognize the woman’s outrage as nothing short of “overegging the pudding.”

    The point isn’t the right or wrong of the matter but why the comment was made in the first place. It seems clear that it was meant to mark the commenter as in some way superior while at the same time disparaging the person who’d taken the trouble to craft the jar. In the workplace or out, correcting other people’s grammar is often done for similar reasons, and many have undoubtedly witnessed someone wielding the “Never end a sentence with a preposition!” stick to carry out just this form of tyranny.

    It’s not why I edit.

    In the Robert Rodriguez vampire flick From Dusk Till Dawn, murdering thief Seth Gecko (George Clooney) discovers that his brother Richie (Quentin Tarantino) has brutally assaulted an innocent cleaning woman. Horrified, Seth tells Richie, “Do you think this is who I am? I am a professional thief. I don’t kill people I don’t have to.”

    When I see an editor lording his or her knowledge (or supposed knowledge) over someone else for the purpose of belittling that person, I think, This is not who I am.

    I like to imagine that copy editors are much like trash men, who during their largely unseen, early-morning rounds clean up our towns and cities. Copy editors, also largely unseen, clean up our text. I’m comfortable with the blue-collar nature of both jobs, and the world is a better place without garbage overflowing bins or dangling modifiers confusing our text.

    I recently interviewed someone for an editing position, and during the interview I allowed as to how I enjoy editing, how I enjoy being alone with a stack of pages and keeping at my desk. In an attempt to be ingratiating, the person said something along the lines of, “It’s good to correct other people, isn’t it?”

    No, that isn’t me. I’d rather think that what I’m doing is helpful to other people. I like to do a good job and be acknowledged for it, sure. I can’t deny a certain self-congratulatory impulse to pat myself on the back every time I mark an edit. I’m not proud of it, but it’s there. At the same time, I’d like to think the majority of that impulse stems not from a feeling of superiority but from a sense of satisfaction at doing my job well. I can also remind myself that as editors, it’s easy to feel superior when we’re registering all the good catches we’ve made, but none of us are immune from that embarrassing gut-punch when someone finds something we’ve missed (and all editors miss from time to time).

    I’m not an “in which” guy, although there are any number of times I’ll recommend using those two words over “where.” I have to imagine that “in which” guys, if they exist, don’t quote Robert Rodriguez movies. I do try to keep an editing mindset that’s consistent with being a decent person. As Seth said, “I may be a bastard, but I’m not a [deleted] bastard.”

    PS: A hearty congratulations to anyone who gets the reference in the title. My only justification is that it made me laugh.

    * As for the use of the word cotton: some of the write-ups were for Western novels, you lousy coffee boiler.

  • Toast

    I’ve never applied eye black before tackling a manuscript. My reading glasses, I’ll readily admit, don’t even come close to saying badass the way that eye black does. Still, with the kickoff of the NFL season scant hours away, it occurs to me that there’s a position on the gridiron not all too dissimilar to that of copy editor: the cornerback.

    Strange, you might think (or passing strange), to compare a position held by one of the world’s finest athletes to the role of copy editor, but there’s one obvious link: a copy editor, like a cornerback, can only screw up. We can only get burned.

    If a copy editor does his or her job correctly, no one notices. By the same token, if a cornerback shuts down a receiver, the ball doesn’t get thrown to that side of the field, and the corner and receiver might as well be invisible. It’s only when the receiver slips behind the defense and hauls in a big gain that the now-hapless-looking corner gets his name called. Any editor who’s missed something (and all editors miss from time to time) knows that feeling of getting schooled. (Thankfully, our moments of shame aren’t broadcast on national television.)

    Like a corner who’s just bitten on a really good fake, all we can do is shake it off, try to learn something from the experience, and remind ourselves that we’re damned good at what we do. What just happened won’t happen again. Not on my watch.

    I don’t want to completely discount our moments of glory, either. Snagging an interception and taking it to the house is a surefire way to bring a crowd (happily spilling beer and overpriced concessions) to its feet. Copy editors enjoy their own time in the limelight, even if pointing out a dangling participle isn’t likely to make any sports channel’s top-ten plays of the day.

    These moments, however, are few and far between. Our lot is to toil in obscurity, the garbage men of publishing, cleaning up unsightly errors while the rest of the world sleeps.

    I enjoy my work. I think it a noble profession. I like leaving a manuscript in better shape than I found it.

    I’m happy to play my position.