One Word or Two

“I was a copy editor for forty years, always in book publishing, most of that time on the academic side (university presses). I retired a few months ago and have decided to start a blog. This won’t be about how to copy edit text or how to become a copy editor. I won’t be trying to compete with the Chicago Manual or with any of the other guides you’ve found by Web search or seen on Amazon. You’ll learn something about the knowledge and skills you need and how to apply them, but that will be incidental – things like that will arise as examples in the course of whatever it is I’m actually discussing. This is mostly going to be about the experiences I’ve had over four decades – about what it’s like to do the job – in the hope that you’ll learn something and be entertained.

I’ve enjoyed every minute of it. That’s hyperbole. A handful of manuscripts have had me close to tears from sheer boredom. Then some mscripts are so difficult that you find yourself editing blind, testing the syntax sentence by sentence but unable to understand a word. (For a while at one house I was the go-to guy for semiotics mscripts – I handled a half dozen of them within two or three years. I still can’t tell you what it is.) Most of the time, though, I’ve looked forward to starting the day, eager to learn something I didn’t know, and proud that I know how to do what I do. I’ve heard some in-house editors (MEs, hereafter) tell me its like being paid to go to grad school, and they’re right, that’s exactly what it’s like. I’ve never wanted to graduate, and I’ve never had to.

My plan is to get a blog going and then turn it into a book once I’ve generated enough content and enough page views to take to a publisher. I’ve got a seven-page list of topics to cover – wildly disorganized – and I’ll stop when I reach the end of it. This blog, in other words, is random notes for the book I plan to turn those notes into. And that means I’m going to make a flamboyant point of not structuring this blog. There will be categories and tags and so on, but with any given instalment – probably weekly – you will never know what you are going to get.

This blog is meant for copy editors, people who want to be copy editors, managing editors who wonder what it is exactly their copy editors do all day, and authors who wonder what copy editors are about to do to their book. Writers will likely find some useful information in it, but with the proviso that a copy editor’s task is largely about being a second set of eyes, a fresh look at what a writer has already done. So you really shouldn’t try to be your own copy editor.

I believe in plain English. I hope you’ve picked up on that by now. It’s a learned reaction to authors who don’t believe in it. Of muttering under my breath “This way is clearer” every two minutes for forty years and six hundred mscripts.” ~ Matthew Kudelka