Is There a Place for Editors in Publishing Today?

Publishing today is either (a) breaking wide open with exciting new platforms that give unknown authors a chance for their voices and ideas to be heard or (b) spewing ill-conceived, badly written goop all over our beautiful world in the literary equivalent of an environmental catastrophe.

I happen to think publishing is both opening (in a good way) and spewing (in a disgusting way). There are exciting new platforms, but many of them are piled high with literary goop. More specifically, they’re piled high with unedited literary goop. Editors can make the piles less goopy, but where do we fit in?

I’m thinking specifically of the world of self-publishing and the many forms of online writing where even the most basic tasks of copyediting are sometimes treated as a luxury not worth indulging in. But “real” publishers and online sources also let a disturbing number of typos, misstatements, and other forms of goop slip by. Recently in the UK, a judge for the Guardian First Book award lamented the lack of thorough developmental editing in many of the books short-listed for that award. So, at least from that judge’s point of view, the goop is bubbling up all over.

What’s to be done? Hire editors. Then let us edit. Yes, editors cost money, but consider what we provide: a goop-free reading experience. I think that’s worth a few bucks.

Ready, Set, Write!

This post is for all you novelists and would-be novelists. November is National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo if you want to sound cool, or plain old NaNo if you’re super cool and in a hurry). If you want to write a novel but think you don’t have time, or if you think it would be really neat to lock yourself in your garret every evening to drink too much coffee while you pound out your masterpiece, November is your month! All you have to do is write a 50,000-word novel in thirty days. That’s less than 1,700 words a day—less than ten double-spaced pages. Totally doable.

Just go to the NaNoWriMo Web site and sign up. It’s free, but they do ask for donations. Then start gathering material, writing notes or an outline—whatever you do to get ready to write. Tell your friends and family what you’re doing, then reassure them that you are not crazy. Use words like “ambitious” and “inspired.” On November 1, start writing. Throughout the month, no matter what happens, write. Don’t wait around for the perfect words to come (that’s what revisions are for). Write. And write some more. At the end of the month you’ll have a first draft of your novel and a nifty NaNoWriMo certificate to hang on your wall. Even better, you’ll know that writing a novel is not impossible.

The Fallible Editor

Here’s another little gem from the 1906 Chicago Manual of Style:

Editors are fallible, and should be made to live up to their own rules. (p.100)

This one makes me squirm a little—or a lot. It comes from the “Hints to Proofreaders” section and is part of a reminder that the proofreader should not assume the edited copy is correct. Editors make mistakes, and it’s ultimately up to the proofreader to catch those mistakes before they find their way into print.

I’m okay with that. I do try to be perfect when I edit, but at the end of the day I know that, no matter how careful and thorough I try to be, I’m going to miss some things. There’s just no getting around it. Recognizing my own fallibility is a healthy thing, I think. It keeps an editor honest and humble.

So I’ve come to terms with the fallibility issue; it’s the “should be made to live up to their own rules” part that’s got me shifting nervously on my balance-ball chair. I know that bit of advice is, strictly speaking, referring to editors who are editing, but I can’t help stretching the context a bit.

Here’s the thing: I know that, in my own writing, I don’t always live up to the rules I enforce in others’ writing. Sometimes I get excited by a particular thought and get a little loosey-goosey with punctuation, spelling, word choice—whatever. I always figure I’ll clean it up before anyone else sees it. But I don’t always clean it up. Because sometimes I don’t want to. If I’ve been punctuating by ear and have put commas in odd places and used too many em dashes that maybe should oughtta be semicolons and I’ve written “maybe should oughtta be” when part of me thinks it sounds stupid and I don’t know how to spell “oughtta” and I know certain readers will think, “Ooooh, that’s so wrong”—and let’s not even talk about run-on sentences that go on and on without even a hint of a subject or verb …

And what about paragraphs? Is it okay to have random one- or two-word paragraphs?

Sure.

Why not?

I’m coming around to my point now, and my point is this: Rules of style and grammar aren’t meant to be a straitjacket. They’re meant to make written communication understandable so it will actually communicate something. You won’t be sentenced to eternal damnation if you consciously break a rule now and then (gosh, I hope I’m right about this). However, if you carelessly break rule after rule in your dissertation, your committee will make your life hell. Context—don’t forget your context. I’m much more careful in Adventures in Editing than I am in my short stories or bad poetry, for example.

So I guess I do live up to my own rules after all. Mostly.

Still fallible, though.

Is It Editing or Proofreading?

Recently a writer contacted me and asked very specifically about editing and proofreading services. I replied with a description of my editing services (mostly copyediting, though I do help with developmental editing from time to time) and explained that proofreading (checking proofs against the edited manuscript) isn’t my area of expertise.

The distinction between editing and proofreading was obvious to me; it was something I learned early in my career. But was my explanation the right one?

A day or two later, I came across another editor’s explanation: “editing” refers to developmental work, and “proofreading” refers to checking for errors in spelling, punctuation, etc.

Okay, now I’m confused, and I know I’m not alone. Every week I see job postings that are titled “Proofreading” but whose job descriptions clearly ask for copyediting. So what is the difference between editing and proofreading?

“A copyeditor is not a proofreader.” So says Karen Judd in Copyediting: A Practical Guide. Copyeditors edit the raw manuscript to spruce up the writer’s work; proofreaders read the prettified, formatted proof against the edited manuscript to make sure nothing weird happened during layout. That’s the simplified distinction as I understand it, but lots of people use “proofread” in the more general sense of “to check for errors in a piece of written work.”

Come to think of it, before I became an editor I “proofed” everything I wrote (except for that one Greek archaeology paper I didn’t have time to proof—sorry, Dr. K). I don’t remember “editing” anything until I started working on our college newspaper. Even then, I edited news stories and proofed term papers, despite the fact that there was really no difference between the two activities. Maybe the difference is that “proof” sounds easy and informal (almost like “Poof!”) and “edit” sounds hard and professional. If you tell an author you’re going to proof their work, they’ll expect you to fix their spelling and add a comma here and there; tell the same author you’re going to edit their work, and they might ask for anesthesia before you begin the surgery.

Professionally, there is a clear distinction between editing and proofreading. But common usage often has very little to do with professional usage. Lots of writers will ask for proofreading when what they really want is copyediting. The message is, editors—and writers—have to spell out exactly what they’re offering—or asking for—regardless of what they call it.

Viagra for Editors?

Lately I’ve been getting frequent spam e-mails encouraging me to buy Viagra from interesting sources. This morning’s e-mail was from “Trustable Viagra Reseller.” “Hi, editor,” the subject line began. Apparently I can get 70% off, which is not nearly as impressive as “Viagra for editor, 77% off.” The place with the bigger discount wasn’t trustable, though.

When I first began receiving these e-mails, I innocently thought there must be some ultra-potent form of the drug being marketed specifically to editors. (Do editors have a reputation for being less potent than, say, fighter pilots?) Maybe Viagra somehow sharpens the synapses and makes it easier to punctuate confusing sentences. What editor couldn’t use something like that? I admit I was a little disappointed to realize the spammers were just plugging the first part of my e-mail address (editor@) into their messages. If I change my address to SparkTwinkle87@, I would be offered the same discount, probably from the same trustable source: “Hi, SparkTwinkle87 — for you 70% off Viagra!”

Then I realized editors don’t really need a fancy drug to help with those tricky punctuation situations and other confusing things. We have far simpler synapse-sharpening methods that don’t involve ordering little blue pills from so-called “trustable resellers.” I myself am currently perfecting a “caffeine and chocolate chip cookie” regimen (caffeine in the morning, cookies in the afternoon). I’m selling the details for a modest fee, but for a limited time and just for you, 77% off!