The Copyeditor's Desk

An editor can and should be a writer’s best advocate and coach. Of course you’re very busy and don’t have time for hand-holding. But you can work a few simple habits into your routine that will redound to your authors’ benefit.

1. In copyediting, tighten prose following Strunk & White but leave enough of the author’s words so she or he can recognize something more than the original “a,” “and,” and “the.” Strive to retain the author’s voice.
2. In editing copy in Word’s “track changes” function, refrain from entering chatty comments or detailed explanations for your edits. Just edit the copy!
3. Return edited copy or page proofs to the author for review before publication.
4. Ascertain that facts are correct. At the least, google assertions and factoids to discover, even if in a cursory way, whether the author has the story straight. If you do not understand something, look it up before querying the author; enter QAs only when you have legitimate questions about which you can speak intelligently.
5. Once you are sure the copy is accurate, free of libel and copyright infringement, and within the lines of the assignment, resolve to advocate for the author against those who would try to curtail or unfairly revise the work. This may mean standing up to people within your organization and to public-relations executives and government officers who wish to control what is being said. Your job is to defend the integrity of your publishing company and of your authors, not to stand aside and let the tides of censorship wash over them.

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.

A young reader not long out of college sent in a query: How do you get started in editorial work, preferably of the freelance variety? Do you need an advanced degree?

If you have a bachelor’s, you probably can get an editorial job. Employers aren’t necessarily looking for degrees; they’re looking for literacy and accuracy. 

In my experience, it’s significantly easier to build a freelance business if you’ve spent some time working on the editorial staff of a magazine or book publisher, or with a public relations firm. I started in a 50% FTE job editing a research newsletter for a university. Didn’t have the faintest idea how to do it—had never heard the term “blueline”—but somehow I managed to land the job anyway. After a couple of years, I had learned as much and done as much as I was going to, absent an infusion of money that the college didn’t have. I left and promptly started getting work as a freelance writer, first for a local business newspaper, then for a city magazine, and before long for regional and national periodicals.

Look for trade groups in your area. By that, I don’t mean groups of would-be writers. I mean organizations such as the Association for Women in Communications, some of whose local chapters still go under the organization’s old name, Women in Communication, Inc., and the  Society for Technical Communication. Both are first-rate networking groups, and local chapters often have job boards that list freelance editing opportunities. Editorial organizations exist in droves. Google editorial + association to find several pages of leads. Probably the most promising for an independent contractor is the Editorial Freelancers Association, which offers job listings and health insurance. IMHO, the only nonfiction writer’s groups worth joining are the Writer’s Guild and the American Society of Journalists and Authors (ASJA). You need a significant track record of publications to get into ASJA, but the Writer’s Guild will take aspiring authors; it also has a health insurance plan.

In addition, seek out trade groups representing your target audience. For instance, if you’re interested in editing legal or medical copy, track down your state and county bar associations and medical societies. Find out if you can advertise in their newsletters or websites, and offer to write an article or column about the importance of well edited copy and how to get it. If you want to edit business documents, consider joining the Chamber of Commerce. Also approach local business weeklies and offer to write an article having to do with what editors can do for corporations.

Another possibility is to go to universities nearby (or not — you can do this all over the country, thanks to the Internet) and get yourself on the graduate schools’ lists of editors. Graduate students, especially foreign students, often need editors to help them with master’s theses and Ph.D. dissertations. Pay isn’t great, but it gets you a track record. 

Look for a state or local association of book publishers and join up. Tina and I have had several promising nibbles from our state book publishers’ association. These usually consist of small publishing houses or even individuals who are busily self-publishing. They often can’t afford to hire a full-time or even part-time editorial assistant, and so they’ll farm out editorial work. Introduce yourself as a person who’s willing to do copyediting and proofreading.

When you’re confident that you’ve developed the skills to edit book-length manuscripts, try contacting local and national trade publishers and university presses. These can be found in Literary Marketplace (LMP), a reference work available at most local libraries. LMP lists hundreds of publishers, with the names and addresses of their managing editors. Apply to these people by name, getting the spelling of their names and their addresses correct; send your resumé, some examples of your work, and a listing of your track record.   

Learn to index books, if you don’t already know how. This can turn into fairly steady freelance work. The American Society for Indexing is a national association. You can buy dedicated indexing software at reasonable prices if you find you are doing a lot of indexing work.

Be sure you know MLA, APA, Chicago, and Associated Press styles through & through. 

It’s not easy. Most of my contract editing work has come to me through word-of-mouth or sheer serendipity. You’re much helped if you can develop a specialty, such as medical, legal, science, textbook, or scholarly editing. None of these are as hard as they sound. We’ve found that editing math copy is actually very easy…much gentler to edit than subjects whose content may contain political viewpoints we disagree with!

I have spoken with self-employed editors who have developed quite specialized practices—particular types of engineering textbooks, for example—who claim to be making a decent living, working on their own schedules and on their own terms. Whether this is true and how these folks define “decent,” I do not know. I’m not quitting my day job, though, until I’m ready to retire with enough pension income to pay for the roof over my head. If you have a working spouse, an independent income, or a job that will support you without exhausting your energy, it’s certainly worth trying to start an editorial business as a sideline and then seeing if you can develop it into a full-time enterprise.

Good luck to you!

We have all encountered individuals who when talking insist on using their fingers to gesture quotation marks in the air around certain words, hoping to add emphasis to their statements. This habit has trickled into some authors’ writing and should be discouraged. It not only confuses the reader but can also take away from the accurate use of quotation marks and italics to set certain words and phrases apart.

Used to tell the reader “this isn’t mine” or “I know this is wrong” are called scare quotes. Used with discretion, the device can be effective. But once is enough. Avoid surrounding a term with scare quotes repeatedly throughout a narrative. Scare quotes used in an ironic way can backfire, because they can create a patronizing or sarcastic effect that risks alienating the reader.

by T.M.

The phrase is able to is perfectly idiomatic in English. Nothing wrong with that, eh?

Well, no. It will do in spoken English, where we can’t comb through our words once they fly out of our mouths. But written English is different from spoken English, because we can edit the stuff! Best of all, we can cut verbosity, saving ink, paper, the planet, and the reader’s time.

In about 99.9% of occurrences, is able to is verbose and unnecessary. It’s a rare occasion that this wordy locution actually serves a purpose. Replace it with can or could, or simply delete it.

Example:

When relatively affluent women enter the labor market, they are able to use some of their income to purchase the domestic services no longer produced in the home. . . .

Better, if Author meant to say it’s a fact that affluent women workers use their income to hire domestic workers:

When relatively affluent women enter the labor market, they use some of their income to purchase the domestic services no longer produced in the home.

Or, if Author meant to emphasize that affluent women may choose to use some of their earnings to hire domestic workers:

When relatively affluent women enter the labor market, they can use some of their income to purchase the domestic services no longer produced in the home.