copyediting
a lot of smart, bookish, literate people i know who are great writers and enjoy wordsmithing their friends' and colleagues' work wonder if they would make good copy editors. i'm never sure the best way to explain what copyediting involves beyond sprucing up someone else's writing. so today i made this list of challenges and judgment calls i faced in a mere hour of copyediting a nonfiction MS (that's short for "manuscript"). i hope it gives you a better sense of my job.
However, the New York City DOE plans to spend one-quarter of its $256 million share of the federal money.
I worked with Mary Carter for the past twenty years as the social studies director at Hofstra University.
"Because of these restrictions, entertainment usually meant just gathering with friends and family members in our homes and yards where we would play games, listen to music and hang out.”
She moved to New York, where she worked as an editor and writer for McGraw Hill Publishers.
While at Hofstra, Mary became part of a team developing and field-testing the New York and Slavery: Complicity and Resistance curriculum that was developed with the support of the New York State Council for the Social Studies.
Not all apostrophes in this Word doc you're copyediting are smart quotes, however, the material will all be published only online, where smart quotes can be but often are not used. What should you do about them?
Mary became a teacher educator at Hofstra University in Long Island.
The fastest way to change the case of a word to lowercase or to change a lowercase word to one with an initial capital letter is to use a Word feature that will do so, rather than retyping the initial letter in the correct case. You even created a keyboard shortcut so that you can lowercase a word with Alt+l or uppercase it with Alt+u just by placing the cursor somewhere within the word. But when you use this Word feature, for some reason the case change is not recorded by Track Changes.
Alphabetically they include Barry Bonds, the all-time home run champion, Ken Caminiti, who died of a drug overdose in 2004, Jose Canseco, who has admitted using banned drugs and testified against other players, Roger Clemons, who was twice tried for lying to Congress about drug use but never convicted, Jason and Jeremy Giambi, home run champion and former record holder Mark McGuire, David Ortiz, Rafael Palmeiro, Andy Petite, the twice suspended Manny Ramirez, Yankee third baseman Alex Rodriguez, a twelve time All-Star and three time most valuable player, and Sammy Sosa who hit 609 home runs, number eight on the all-time baseball list.
However, the New York City DOE plans to spend one-quarter of its $256 million share of the federal money.
- Is the hyphen in one-quarter correct? Can you give a rule that another person could use in any similar situation?
I worked with Mary Carter for the past twenty years as the social studies director at Hofstra University.
- Is it the narrator or Mary Carter who was the social studies director? How important is it to query the author to clarify this?
- Does your decision change if you know that this article has been published previously and this a reprint, so another copy editor has apparently already decided it's fine as is, and also this is quoted material?
"Because of these restrictions, entertainment usually meant just gathering with friends and family members in our homes and yards where we would play games, listen to music and hang out.”
- Would you add commas to this quote anywhere?
- Does your decision change if it was quoted from a spoken interview versus written text?
- If you don't know what it's quoted from?
- If the MS it's quoted in uses serial commas throughout?
She moved to New York, where she worked as an editor and writer for McGraw Hill Publishers.
- Would it occur to you to check whether McGraw-Hill should be hyphenated and whether "Publishers" is part of their official name?
- What if the company's use of the hyphen has changed over the years? Do you need to check how the company name was styled at the time the person in question worked for McGraw(-)Hill?
- What if you came across this publisher name in a bibliography or reference list -- would you look into how it was styled at the time of the book's publication?
- How much time would you spend looking into this question if the company name appeared both with and without a hyphen in the initial Google results from apparently equally reputable sources?
While at Hofstra, Mary became part of a team developing and field-testing the New York and Slavery: Complicity and Resistance curriculum that was developed with the support of the New York State Council for the Social Studies.
- Is the hyphen in "field-testing" correct?
- Should the curriculum name be enclosed in quotes? If curriculum names are sometimes in quotes and other times not throughout the MS, how would you decide which to go with? How important is it that they are all the same, or can you decide on a case-by-case basis? Is this an issue worth querying the author about?
- Should you change "curriculum that was developed" to "curriculum, which was developed"?
- Does it seem probably that the "for the Social Studies" is the correct council name, or is "the" possibly wrong? Should you take the time to look it up or trust the author and/or decide it's not important enough to spend time on?
- How much time should you spend looking over your queries to the author making sure that you didn't make any embarrassing typos like "does it seem probably that"?
Not all apostrophes in this Word doc you're copyediting are smart quotes, however, the material will all be published only online, where smart quotes can be but often are not used. What should you do about them?
- Leave them, because it's just not that important and it's possible that all quotes will be changed one way or the other by the publisher in the process of formatting the material for the Web, and even if not, probably nobody will notice.
- Change all the straight quotes to smart quotes by hand when you come across them.
- Do a global find/change in the whole document for all apostrophes, which will change the straight quotes to smart quotes automatically but will also replace all already-smart quotes with themselves, creating hundreds of tracked changes that will be distracting and potentially time-consuming for the author and/or editor to review and accept.
- Ask your assigning editor what to do, knowing that you may not hear back for a couple days and in the meantime will encounter a couple dozen straight quotes, and that perhaps this is a piddling thing you shouldn't bother said editor with, and that it may be embarrassing (or speak badly of yu) to ask such a question a few days before the deadline, which is the soonest you were able to get started on this project.
Mary became a teacher educator at Hofstra University in Long Island.
- There should be a comma after "University," because "in Long Island" is incidental bonus info; it doesn't specify which Hoftra the author is referring to. But the author never uses commas before location attributions in this MS, and it's true that they can create a lot of extra commas that may just distract the reader. Should you add them all anyway? Add them only in cases where they don't get cumbersome? Query the author (and what would you say?)?
The fastest way to change the case of a word to lowercase or to change a lowercase word to one with an initial capital letter is to use a Word feature that will do so, rather than retyping the initial letter in the correct case. You even created a keyboard shortcut so that you can lowercase a word with Alt+l or uppercase it with Alt+u just by placing the cursor somewhere within the word. But when you use this Word feature, for some reason the case change is not recorded by Track Changes.
- Is it unethical to make these changes in such a way that the author/editor will never know you did so?
- Do you make a judgment call for each word whose case needs to be changed about whether to do it the slow way that will allow the author/editor to consider whether they approve of your change or whether to do it the fast invisible way? Or do you give yourself a free pass to make your life easier because either you're getting paid per page and thus get no extra money for being slow, or because you're getting paid per hour and the publisher probably doesn't want to pay extra for you to be fastidious?
Alphabetically they include Barry Bonds, the all-time home run champion, Ken Caminiti, who died of a drug overdose in 2004, Jose Canseco, who has admitted using banned drugs and testified against other players, Roger Clemons, who was twice tried for lying to Congress about drug use but never convicted, Jason and Jeremy Giambi, home run champion and former record holder Mark McGuire, David Ortiz, Rafael Palmeiro, Andy Petite, the twice suspended Manny Ramirez, Yankee third baseman Alex Rodriguez, a twelve time All-Star and three time most valuable player, and Sammy Sosa who hit 609 home runs, number eight on the all-time baseball list.
- Oh geez, leaving aside the issue of whether to punctuate this list with semicolons between entities so that it's clear which description goes with which person, and whether to do that yourself or ask the author to do it, and the poor punctuation in general -- do you have to look up every name to make sure it's spelled right?
- Does your decision change if this is in a publication about baseball (presumably the author knows baseball names, but then again the audience will know right away if one is wrong) or about teaching sceondary school (the author probably can't be relied upon, but most readers won't care either)?
- Does your decision change if it is the beginning of the workday and you're feeling fresh, or the end of the workday and you're feeling fried -- and if so, do you feel some nagging guilt about that?