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This is my favorite of your posts so far! Probably because I just finished the final round of edits on my new book. But you left out the group that's even worse than copy editors: proofreaders. At PRH/Waterbrook, they send it to a couple of proofreaders AFTER all the copy editing is done, and then you have to deal with their "I didn't follow this," or, "You lost me there," comments. I had one that absolutely didn't get any of my humor, in chapters where the humor made the whole point... frustrating. My wife and I realized that the manuscript has to be readable by everyone, so some proofreaders need to be of different educational and cultural backgrounds than the writer.

At the end of the project, all the edits make the book "just right" for as many readers as possible. Grateful for editors! (And even proofreaders)

Thank you for another great post!

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Congrats on finishing the editorial process! That’s major.

It’s all about refining. We usually think everyone understands us—except they don’t. Everyone brings different assumptions and experiences to a text, all of which affect how they read and understand it. The editorial process is designed to help a book work with as many of those assumptions and experiences—as broadly—as possible. I still tell writers I work with today something I learned back when I was in publishing: clear is better than clever. The real magic happens when you push through the editorial process with your own style intact and yet still as accessible as possible.

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I kept meaning to get back to this one. Really great. I’m not an editor in any stretch of the imagination but I love the substantive part.

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It’s rewarding work. And it’s fun when an author appreciates the work. It almost always improves the end product.

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I've done it twice for friends who were self publishing. I feel like both times I made an impact.

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I bet you were great at it.

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I love this post! Thanks for a peek into the kitchen of how book sausage is made. I have a hyper-critical eye/ear when it comes to reading a book, article, story (or even a comment on a Facebook post). I often wonder how something made it past layers of copy editors and proof readers. When I got my first book published the editor suggested two punctuation edits and said, "this is the best manuscript we've ever received..." I guess I didn't know how high that praise really was. Thank you!

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Wow! And you’d be surprised what can sneak through. The truth is a lot of developmental editors don’t have enough time to do thorough edits—there’s the pressure to be out acquiring new authors. You usually don’t see outright shabby work, but I do sometimes see a book where I think the editors either nodded off or pushed it through too quickly. Sometimes that happens because the author overruns their deadlines so far, there’s no time for a thorough job—and there’s revenue attached to that ship date.

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As a lifetime fan of the —, as a long-ago recovered Wm F. Buckley Jr. Oxford-comma practitioner, as a former newspaper copy editor who broke and ignored as many archaic and arbitrary and mindlessly enforced newspaper writing style rules as I could without being sent to Journalism Jail, it hurts me to learn that the ; got its own book -- no matter how good and smart Joel says -- and proves -- it is.

Joel is always correct and wise beyond his years when it comes to writing/editing issues. His statement in a previous column on copy editors that 'Clear is better than clever' perfectly sums up what punctuation and the application of it by editors/copy editors should always aim for. I would add "Editors should leave no fingerprints."

All major and minor editing should be done in the service of the reader, i.e., the customer.

It should not be done to please an idiosyncratic, tight-ass editor or a desk-strapped copy editor or a list of 101 unwritten commandments of style that was handed down to a century ago by some stodgy unknown god named Strunk, an elite gang of ivory-towered punctuation-priests in Chicago or the un-elected and arbitrary editorial board of the Almighty New York Times (who one day up-and-invented the style of describing still-living people as "Mr." on the second reference -- gave us famous people like "Mr. Sting.")

I taught one college class in feature writing at Pitt in 1993 before the authorities caught on to me. Without stealing from Vonnegut, the first thing I told the 14 rookie writers was, "If you get anything out of this class, let it be this: Never use a semicolon." Most of the kids didn't know what a semicolon was, but it probably worked because I don't remember having to get rid of a single cumbersome ; in their papers and replace it with a punchy red-inked — or full-stop . Unless you are doing a term paper for an Econ 303 class that has to list all the things wrong with government central planning, both the — and the . are sharper tools than the annoying, artificial and now, thank Mencken, virtually extinct ; .

While writing this in the pre-dawn darkness, I thought back to my high school days and realized that my development as a subversive journalist was greatly influenced by my love for e.e. cummings, who wrote this fabulous punctuation-free poem, the only one I can still recite today:

"Buffalo Bill ’s "

Buffalo Bill ’s

defunct

who used to

ride a watersmooth-silver

stallion

and break onetwothreefourfive pigeonsjustlikethat

Jesus

he was a handsome man

and what i want to know is

how do you like your blueeyed boy

Mister Death

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(Well, of course I have to wonder who edits your Substack posts…)

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Feb 1, 2023
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Thanks, man! You’re right about editors being trained pros. They bring a critical faculty to the work that the author probably doesn’t have. That’s a tremendous value and prevents a lot of underbaked books from publication until their problems are fixed.

I also get the concern about moralistic copy editors. The job is help an author say what they want to say more clearly—not alter what they say or bring it into conformity with an agenda outside the book itself. Where that gets tricky, of course, is that the publisher will usually have pretty broad contractual authority to edit the book as they see fit.

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Recovering newspaper copy editor here... I made it my mission to ignore or subvert as many rules and regulations of style as I could while making sure the reader was not being abused/confused by the writer. Clear is always better than clever, for sure. A good copy editor should leave no fingerprints for the writer or reader to see.

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