The Copyeditor's Desk

The ever-resourceful Mrs. Micah has a wonderful post at Frugal Hacks that is so nifty I had to forward it to all my hard-copy friends (those are the ones who live in the nonvirtual world). Did you know that through iTunes you can download whole university courses, FREE? Yes. You, too,  can attend Yale, Harvard, Stanford, or even the Great Desert University. Subjects range from the ponderous (math!) to the lighthearded (humor!). Go to Mrs. M’s post for full instructions on how to get at this bounty.

So…what does that have to do with editing? Only this: effective editors are educated people. The better educated you are, the better you do your job, the faster you do your job, and the better you can earn. A curious mind is the editor’s most powerful tool. Like any tool, it must be primed, polished, and honed.

When, for example, Author refers to  ”a fairly common set of historicomaterial and theoretical conditions and concerns,” it’s useful to know she probably is alluding to Lowith’s Meaning in History rather than intending to say “historically material” in jargonesque form.  It’s useful, too, to have some familiarity with the workings of more than one language, so you can recognize a typo or a misspelling when Author uses a non-English word, without having to look up every third word (QUICK! is it Mémoires de la Société académique d’archéologie or Mémoires de la Société academique d’archéologie?).

So…just imagine the opportunity to study with some of the greatest teachers on the planet—without the onus of grades, and free of cost! And just imagine how much more I can earn than certain of my colleagues do, because I happen to know these things off the top of my head. Check it out: iTunes University, an amazing resource.

—VH

When converting hyphens to one-en dashes in inclusive numbers, I like to do a manual search and replace (find what: – ; replace with: ^=) rather than allowing software such as Editor’s Toolkit to do it automatically.

Manually checking each instance of a hyphen allows you to catch errors that you might otherwise have overlooked. In the piece I just finished, for example, I found I had missed several instances where the author had written “first-hand” rather than the currently accepted firsthand, and I had completely blown off “mid-life” (midlife) and story-teller (storyteller).

Same is true of using macros to replace #-# or #1/n# with 1/m: often an author types any number of variants in a single manuscript: word#-word, word-#word, wordhyphenhypenword, and the like. A manual search helps ensure that you won’t overlook any such quirks.