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EsotericaDecember 15, 2007 The second of my two interminable jobs is nearly done: the zipped-up file that I e-mailed back to the press yesterday included everything but the endnotes, which the author is working on this weekend. I'm trying to stop muttering, Why didn't you do it goddamn right the first time? And, more to the point, Why didn't your goddamn editor tell you that when you're using secondary sources you don't need to list the routing details for every goddamn memo and radiogram that appears in the secondary source, and if you do please include the page reference from the secondary source, eh? If you've never worked on scholarly books, or books with scholarly pretensions, and if when you read such books you rarely pay attention to the notes (especially the endnotes, which are at the back of the book rather than the bottom of the pages), this will not mean much to you. Not to worry: most endnotes aren't exactly fascinating, even for those who must pay attention to them, and most readers can afford to ignore them completely. But for scholars, and for anyone interested in how the body of human knowledge deepens and expands, endnotes are essential. They form the work's foundation. Plenty of works have been discredited because their foundation was sloppily constructed, and some scholarly edifices have collapsed completely when their underpinnings were exposed. Academic scholars are trained in documenting sources, and endnotes produced by a capable and meticulous academic are a joy forever -- which is to say that all the copyeditor has to do is making sure everything's spelled right, commas and periods are in the right place, and no picky-bitch details are missing. This particular author is not an academic. It took a preparatory clean-up pass through the notes before I could even begin to see what was missing. Two passes later, we're getting close to completion. Whew. Endnotes absorb more time and energy per page than the rest of the book, and slogging through them feels less like editing and more like balancing your checkbook when you've let four months of statements pile up in your inbox. Make that four years of statements, and back in the days before you were keeping a duplicate checkbook in Quicken and were thus less likely to make disastrous arithmetic mistakes because your handwriting is so bad. Now that I've bored you (you non-editors and non-scholars, that is) to distraction with the esoteric details of my trade, it's time to admit that this is what bugged me most about the dearly departed job and the dearly almost-departed job, aka Dreck I and Dreck II, aka the movie book and the World War II book. Both were written for the cognoscenti in their respective fields, but neither wanted to admit it. The primary technique in both books was the same: continual dropping-in of names and details with no explanation and not enough context for an intelligent but uninitiated reader to figure it out. Yes, it's true that some works are written for readers who have considerable prior knowledge in the field, and that any reader who lacks that knowledge knows that she's going to have to hustle to keep up. But neither of these books had such a tight focus, and the exclusionary details -- the ones that said, See how much I know? See how much you don't know? -- were generally petty. This is the kind of stuff that a competent writer who wants to include as many interested readers as possible can work in without much trouble. While thwacking away at Dreck I and Dreck II I did a smaller -- much smaller: it was in and out of here in less than two days -- job whose authors took a different approach. The authors are jazz musicians, and the entire purpose of their project is to make their music more accessible and more enjoyable for more listeners. What a relief! When you know a subject very well, it does take some effort to distill and organize your knowledge for someone who knows much less. That's the essence of teaching, and it doesn't just happen in schools.
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