A Couple of Words on Editing
Mar. 20th, 2008 11:46 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
gnomi1. *No* editor is perfect. Everyone misses things. The human brain corrects for what one expects to see, which isn't always what one *does* see.
For example: Many people misread the following, even when they're asked to read it aloud
The general rule I was taught is that every editorial pass catches 50% of the remaining errors. It's an asymptotic relationship between the number of editorial passes and the number of remaining errors. So, yes. The more editorial passes that a manuscript goes through, the fewer errors remain. However, that also means that, regardless of how good an editor you are or how good an editor you have, no manuscript will result in a flawless final publication. This applies to both fiction and nonfiction.
2. Related to the above: When you receive the final copy of the published text, invariably you (whether you are the editor or the writer) will open to the page that has the most glaring error that was not caught.
3. A good number of editorial decisions on grammar come down to house style. There are a number of grammatical "rules" that are, simply, style choices. Use of the Oxford comma (I'm for), allowing conjunctions at the beginning of sentences (I'm wishy-washy, depending on context), and hyphenation of prefixes or suffixes (I'm usually against, unless it disambiguates or clarifies) (that said, I stand firm on the hyphen in "e-mail") are *all* style issues. Different houses do it differently, and we freelancers strive to remember which house does things which way (house style guides are your friend).
4. The editor and the writer are, in the best-case scenario, partners in any given project. If there are things we don't know about, we can't watch out for them, so we depend on the writer to clue us in. By the same token, we owe it to the writer to clarify and confirm if we're confused.
For example: Many people misread the following, even when they're asked to read it aloud
He sat on the
the table.
The general rule I was taught is that every editorial pass catches 50% of the remaining errors. It's an asymptotic relationship between the number of editorial passes and the number of remaining errors. So, yes. The more editorial passes that a manuscript goes through, the fewer errors remain. However, that also means that, regardless of how good an editor you are or how good an editor you have, no manuscript will result in a flawless final publication. This applies to both fiction and nonfiction.
2. Related to the above: When you receive the final copy of the published text, invariably you (whether you are the editor or the writer) will open to the page that has the most glaring error that was not caught.
3. A good number of editorial decisions on grammar come down to house style. There are a number of grammatical "rules" that are, simply, style choices. Use of the Oxford comma (I'm for), allowing conjunctions at the beginning of sentences (I'm wishy-washy, depending on context), and hyphenation of prefixes or suffixes (I'm usually against, unless it disambiguates or clarifies) (that said, I stand firm on the hyphen in "e-mail") are *all* style issues. Different houses do it differently, and we freelancers strive to remember which house does things which way (house style guides are your friend).
4. The editor and the writer are, in the best-case scenario, partners in any given project. If there are things we don't know about, we can't watch out for them, so we depend on the writer to clue us in. By the same token, we owe it to the writer to clarify and confirm if we're confused.
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no subject
Date: 2008-03-20 04:40 pm (UTC)