Susanna J. Sturgis   Martha's Vineyard writer and editor
writer editor born-again horse girl

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Copyeditorial Trade Talk

April 25, 2007

Long before I kept a bloggery, I did my best blogging on subjects editorial on Copyediting-L, an English-language e-list for copyeditors, other editors, librarians, writers, and other lovers of the written word. Copyediting-L -- known as CE-L to its subscribers, who call themselves CELmates, the CELery, and various other CEL-prefixed names -- is probably more crucial to my editorial competence than any of the reference books I list on my style sheets. CE-L is my secret weapon, my amanuensis, my eminence grise, my sparring partner. For the time being it's also my only way of freely passing on the knowledge that has been freely passed on to me, especially by Sylvia Abrams, my first and most important editorial mentor.

So this morning a self-described "newbie" copyeditor asked a question: How do copyeditors decide when to make changes that go far beyond the usual correction of typos and grammatical errors? "My apologies," this subscriber concluded, "if this is too basic a question." This is, with very minor changes, what I wrote back:

It's not too basic a question -- it may be the most important question copyeditors ask themselves while working, and should never stop asking themselves: is this change justified?

Correcting spelling and grammatical errors is relatively easy to justify -- when the errors are really errors, which sometimes they aren't.

Sometimes an author will thank you for catching three instances of the same word in one paragraph -- except when the repetition was intentional, in which case the author will curse you and probably the entire copyeditorial breed in absentia.

Most of the time the answer is "It depends." It depends on how much editing the manuscript has had before it gets to the copyeditor and whether the author will see the manuscript after the copyeditor finishes with it. In Erewhon, every writer has the time, expertise, editorial support, and literary ability to do justice to his or her project; then it goes to a substantive editor who helps work out all structural, organizational, and logical difficulties; then it goes to a line editor who will fix sentences that need help; and then it goes to the copyeditor, who of course only has to catch the typos and subject-verb disagreements that everyone else missed.

In the real world (surprise! ) it doesn't work that way. Sometimes there is no substantive editor. Sometimes the substantive editor is asleep at the keyboard, or underqualified, or overworked. Line editors are pretty much out of the lineup -- I and plenty of other editors I know do line editing, but I don't think I know anyone whose job title is "line editor."

Any copyeditor would do well to borrow the physician's commandment: "First, do no harm." An apprentice editor should take fewer risks than a journeyman, a journeyman fewer than a master. The less experience an editor has, the more time, research, and thought she should put into making changes that go beyond corrections. It's the time, research, and thought that eventually, with plenty of experience and a healthy dose of humility, lead to mastery -- at which stage you finally know how much you don't know.

You'll get to the point where sometimes you'll know what the author meant to say even though the words s/he chose don't actually say it, or you can supply the word the author was reaching for even when s/he didn't quite grasp it. At the same time you never forget the possibility that you might be 100% wrong.

CE-L provides LOTS of insight into how editors decide what to query and what to change. You can use the various problem sentences as your own test questions, even if you decide not to respond on- or off-list. One of the most important and ongoing lessons of CE-L is that there's often more than one "right" way to edit a sentence, and that some changes are more defensible than others.

* * *

To all of the above I'll add my copyeditor's version of the Serenity Prayer, which I made into a little poster that I can see from my desk:

Grant me the serenity . . .
to recognize the prose
I should not change,
the courage to change the prose I can
and the wisdom to know the difference.

 

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