#copyeditors

[theidiotabides]

Finally got around to reading the graphic novel adaptations & just read The Message & uhhhhhhhhhhh

Was nobody going to tell me that they got Ax's NAME WRONG????

That's a typo, right? That's gotta be a typo, but like -- not to be a copyeditor on main, but I actually am a copyeditor, and I just -- how THE FUCK do you miss THAT? It's TWO LETTERS off, too! What the fuck?

It's the only time his full name is said in the book, so there's no other instance to compare it to, but surely they didn't just CHANGE HIS NAME, right? Why would they? Do I have a misprint copy or something? WHAT IS HAPPENING. I DEMAND SATISFACTION. SCHOLASTIC, EXPLAIN YOURSELF

OG text for context/completionism:

[allthingslinguistic]

But by the end of my five years [as a copy editor], I felt intellectually and psychologically worn down by the labor I logged on my biweekly timesheets. Whatever roller-rink of neurons helped me spot aberrations from convention had grown practiced and strong, and it was difficult to read any unconventional sentence without reflexively rearranging it into a more conventional form.

Something had shrunken and withered in me, for having directed so much of my attention away from the substance of the stories I read and into their surface. Few people in our office, let alone outside its walls, would notice the variation in line spacing, the fact that Jesus’ was lacking its last, hard “s,” or whatever other reason we were sending the proofs to be printed again—and if they did, who the fuck cared? [....]

I can’t help wondering, though, whether there wasn’t something insidious in the way we worked—some poison in our many rounds of minute changes, in our strained and often tense conversations about ligatures and line breaks, in our exertions of supposedly benign, even benevolent, power; if those polite conversations constituted a covert, foot-dragging protest against change, an insistence on the quiet conservatism of the liberal old guard, and if they were a distraction from the conversations that might have brought meaningful literary or linguistic change about. In fact, I sense myself enacting the same foot-dragging here.

It’s fun—it’s dangerously pleasing—to linger in the minutiae of my bygone copyediting days, even if, by the time I left that job to teach college writing full-time, I was convinced that “correcting” “errors” of convention most readers would never notice was the least meaningful work a person could possibly do. I’m writing this, however, to ask whether copyediting as it’s been practiced is worse than meaningless: if, in fact, it does harm.

*

Do we really need copyediting? I don’t mean the basic clean-up that reverses typos, reinstates skipped words, and otherwise ensures that spelling and punctuation marks are as an author intends. Such copyediting makes an unintentionally “messy” manuscript easier to read, sure.

But the argument that texts ought to read “easily” slips too readily into justification for insisting a text working outside dominant Englishes better reflect the English of a dominant-culture reader—the kind of reader who might mirror the majority of those at the helm of the publishing industry, but not the kind of reader who reflects a potential readership (or writership) at large.

A few years before leaving copyediting, I began teaching a scholarly article I still read with students today, Lee A. Tonouchi’s “Da State of Pidgin Address.” Written in Hawai’ian Creole English, or Pidgin, it asks whether what “dey say” is true: “dat da perception is dat da standard english talker is going automatically be perceive fo’ be mo’ intelligent than da Pidgin talker regardless wot dey talking, jus from HOW dey talking.” The article leaves many students questioning the assumptions they began reading it with: its effect is immediate, personal, and profound.

In another article I pair it with, “Should Writers Use They Own English,” Vershawn Ashanti Young answers Tonouchi’s implicit question, writing, “don’t nobody’s language, dialect, or style make them ‘vulnerable to prejudice.’ It’s ATTITUDES.” Racial difference and linguistic difference, Young reminds us, are intertwined, and “Black English dont make it own-self oppressed.”

It’s clear that copyediting as it’s typically practiced is a white supremacist project, that is, not only for the particular linguistic forms it favors and upholds, which belong to the cultures of whiteness and power, but for how it excludes or erases the voices and styles of those who don’t or won’t perform this culture. Beginning with an elementary school teacher’s red pen, and continuing with agents, publishers, and university faculty who on principle turn away work that arrives on their desk in unconventionally grammatical or imperfectly punctuated form, voices that don’t mimic dominance are muffled when they get to the page and also before they get there—as schools, publishers, and their henchmen entrench the idea that those writing outside convention are not writing “well,” and therefore ought not set their voices to paper at all. [...]

Like other emissaries of the powerful (see, e.g., the actual police), copy editors often wield what power they do have unpredictably, teetering between generous attention and brute, insistent force. You saw this in the way our tiny department got worked up over the stubbornness of an editor or author who had dug in their heels: their resistance was a threat, sometimes to our suspiciously moral-feeling attachment to “correctness,” sometimes to our aesthetics, and sometimes to our sense of ourselves. [...]

There’s a flip side, if it’s not already obvious, to the peculiar “respect” I received in that dusty closet office at twenty-two. A 2020 article in the Columbia Journalism Review refers casually to “fusspot grammarians and addled copy editors”; I’m not the only one who imagines the classic copy editor as uncreative, neurotic, and cold.

I want to say they’re the publishing professionals most likely, in the cultural imagination, to be female, but that doesn’t feel quite right: agents and full-on editors are female in busty, sexy ways, while copy editors are brittle, unsexed. Their labor nevertheless shares with other typically female labors a concern with the small and the surface, those aspects of experience many of us are conditioned to dismiss.

I’m willing to bet, too, that self-professed “grammar snobs” rarely come from power themselves—that there is a note of aspirational literariness in claiming the identity as such. [...]

It makes me wonder if, in renouncing my job when I left it—in calling copyediting the world’s least meaningful work—I might have been reenacting some of the literary scene’s most entrenched big-dick values: its insistence on story over surface (what John Gardner called the “fictional dream”), on anti-intellectualism but also the elitist cloak of it-can-never-be-taught. The grammar snob’s aspiration and my professor’s condescension bring to mind the same truism: that real power never needs to follow its own rules. [...]

Copyediting shares with poetry a romantic attention to detail, to the punctuation mark and the ordering of words. To treat someone else’s language with that fine a degree of attention can be an act of love. Could there be another way to practice copyediting—less attached to precedent, less perseverating, and more eagerly transgressive; a practice that, to distinguish itself from the quietly violent tradition from which it arises, might not be called “copyediting” at all; a practice that would not only “permit” but amplify the potential for linguistic invention and preservation in any written work?

--- Against Copyediting: Is It Time to Abolish the Department of Corrections? Helen Betya Rubinstein on Having Power Over More Than Just Commas

[daisywords]

my very controversial take as an editor is that sometimes just because you can take "that" out of a sentence doesn't mean you should

[aeondeug]

the pattern spiders are my new favorite thing in exalted. i love them. just weird little guys holding spirited debates over the fate equivalent of the oxford comma while other people just DO NOT UNDERSTAND THE COMPLEXITY OF THEIR WORK.

[oakappleday]

The Queen [was] given lots of food to take home and pass on to the King, who, she says, is “doing very well.” She added: “I try to keep him in order.”

[sleepnoises]

i can guess why redacted local government put "you will be joining a community of 431.25 professional employees" on their jobs page but it IS silly. we have to admit it is silly

[idontwantrobyntodie]

I need every baby writer writing ~subversive~ Bible fanfic/retellings to realize that Paradise Lost already came out many, many years ago and you are not being as edgy as you think you are

[froyocorp]

silly cogs i made with my mind

[diamondnokouzai]

cmon remote copyeditor job....email me back AND SAY YES.........

[likes-words-and-shrimp]

Colette complimenting Lloyd on his outfits and making him all flustered as he stutters and does the same back is the cutest thing to me.

[ephemeral-winter]

professor just sent out a 75 point checklist of things that have to be "correct" in our term papers (not due until december) and they are driving me insane because some are genuine common writing mistakes (fine) and some are his opinions about how academic writing should sound and be formatted (wrong; classist to boot) and many many more are only relevant to an outdated version of the chicago manual of style, which is funny, because he also tells us to refer to the current version for all citation information

[theradioghost]

Why do you type in all lowercase?

i'm very tired always, i don't care about formatting niceties on my own personal damn social media page, and anyone who doesn't like it can suck my english degree

[nothing2seehere420]

My favorite part of being a copyeditor is being a guileless pedant. "Oh, you don't like that I hyphenated 'stand-alone.' I was just doing what the dictionary told me uwu."

[mythgirlimagines]

Talentswap idea - Kokichi Ouma = Ultimate Copyeditor

I LOVE copyediting

Kokichi was first put in charge of copyediting for a school publication in late elementary school, which was when he found out that he was actually pretty darn good at it.

Not to mention, he found it pretty fun. He was good at finding errors, making sure everything was uniform. It didn’t take him long to start helping with copyediting elsewhere, like local papers and publications.

It would be great for him to one day be a copyeditor for a large publication, but working for several smaller ones and getting his name out there was good enough for high school.

Because of his responsibilities, he’s really good about fact-checking information. This helps out a lot of arguments his classmates tend to have, himself included in that group.

It’s more than just grammar and punctuation, he often has to remind people, though he doesn’t mind proofing his classmates’ papers if they ask nicely (and give him candy in exchange).

[thoughtsofthegirlwiththecurl]

I used to copyedit 120,000 word super dense PhD manuscripts for 8 hours a day, five days a week, and now I'm like "what do mean you want me to copyedit 1200 sentences of catalog copy??? I'm gonna die probably"

[lavender-laney]

Do you need another pair of eyes on your writing?

All-in-one proofreader/copyeditor/beta reader services!

As a writer who will, without fail, notice a dozen typos, inconsistencies, and structure issues the second I post my work online or decide I'm finished with it, I know this struggle like a dear friend. Asking someone to read over my work and point out issues I haven't noticed always helps, but asking someone with a trained eye for this work is especially beneficial. I am a reporter for a statewide, well-respected newspaper, which gives me experience with quick turnaround times, effective communication, research, and, of course, writing and editing. When I'm not interviewing doctors on the latest developments in pancreatic cancer treatments or researching the history of newly designated landmarks, I spend time working on my own projects or making my way through my endless TBR pile. If you think I can help you on your own writing project(s), let's talk about it!

My rate, which includes copyediting (grammar, spelling, sentence structure), an evaluation of the overall concept and characters, as well as in-depth discussion (either via message or voice chat) of my feedback and any questions you may have. I currently charge $0.015 per word, which translates to $15 per 1,000 words. For larger projects (exceeding 20,000 words) a more exact quote will be provided.

I'm also happy to adjust to whatever you're looking for in an editor! If you want me to be super blunt and rip apart each word of your story? I can totally do that. But if you want someone who can give more empathetic advice, (something I can understand seeking, as someone who prefers criticism in the form of a compliment sandwich lol), I am happy to do that instead! I've been told I'm good at being honest without acting as though my advice is the only correct option.

If you're interested in chatting with me about this, please reach out! My DMs are always open. You can also contact me on Discord, at laneybug.

Thanks for reading, and reblogs/shares are appreciated! :)

PS this felt so painfully advertise-y to write but I'm just trying to sound professional ... I promise I'm actually a chill person <3