True Crime in Copyediting

To my regret, in a lather recently over copyeditors who waste time searching for rules that don’t exist, I failed to acknowledge something important in defense of the offenders: that is, how much credit they deserve for looking up anything at all.

Our ignorance is a given. We all have vast deficits, in countless areas of knowledge; that’s no sin. But to challenge, query, or—god forbid—change perfectly good text without making the least effort to check it is one of the great crimes of copyediting.

Looking things up is easier than ever before. And not having Internet access is no excuse, at least not for professional editors: If you’re taking money for copyediting and don’t have the right tools, you’re a crook. If you have the tools and don’t use them, you’re a fraud.

Last week, Jan Freeman wrote of her surprise that readers would correct her mention of Goober Pyle to Gomer Pyle without checking the facts. Readers of this page regularly question usages without looking up the words first. I love informed queries, and I welcome correction. But here’s a clue for future doubters: I always look up the words I think you’ll challenge.

Scientific evidence demonstrates the focus and discipline required to reconsider mid-edit. Recently radiologists at the University of Chicago Hospitals were able to monitor my own brain functions while I was working. When I encountered the passage “faculty want clear, bright line advice,” their scan revealed the following process:

Impulse: Add comma after “bright”?
Doubt: What’s “line advice”?
Impulse: I wish I had a donut . . .
Compulsion: Query the author: “Typo?”
Alarm: !!Ding!!Ding!!

I typed “bright line” into Google, where the top hit was a definition of “bright-line rule” at Wikipedia: “A clearly defined rule or standard, generally used in law, composed of objective factors, which leaves little or no room for varying interpretation.”

Decision: Hyphenate “bright-line.”*

With a dictionary and a search engine, you can find most of what you need to know in seconds. Online reference works are easy to find, and some are free. (Katharine O’Moore-Klopf’s KOK Edit site has an excellent list of online editing tools.) What’s difficult is to form the habit of looking things up before you expose yourself as ignorant or lazy.

So next time you’re tempted to whinge about some usage or other, stop to look it up. It takes less time to click through your online dictionary than to type a complaint to me.

(And yes, I meant whinge. I looked it up.)

______

*I tolerated the slight redundancy as a kind of gloss to help other readers; I tolerated the jargon because it suited the book.

16 Comments

  1. Love the transcript of the editorial brain in action! And thanks ever so much for pointing your readers to the “Editing Tools” page of the Copyeditors’ Knowledge Base.

  2. A question!
    If ‘bright-line’ takes a hyphen, wouldn’t the comma in “faculty want clear, bright line advice” need to go? (The bright-line rule is new to me.)

  5. Amen, LeaGalanter. A while back, one of my coworkers came across the phrase “raised the specter of a lawsuit” (or something close to it). Then she and another coworker started discussing what the phrase should be, and they settled on “raise the scepter” rather than “raise the specter.”
    I was both surprised and annoyed that, first of all, they weren’t familiar with the phrase and therefore assumed that it was wrong and second, that they didn’t bother to look it up in a dictionary or corpus or Google search and concocted an ill-informed miscorrection instead.
    I think one of the most important skills a copy editor can have is to look up everything that they aren’t sure of.

  9. Ah, but Larry K., “whinge” is so much more evocative–to me, at least–than “whine” is. Besides, it should never be an editor’s function to dumb down good writing.

  10. It horrifies me that there are professional copy editors who don’t look things up. When I worked in house, some colleagues would approach me to explain the rules – they claimed that CMS was too hard to use and they figured I’d probably know the answer. Surely this is an essential part of the job?
    As for ‘whinge’, it’s commonly used in Australian English. I think editors should celebrate the diversity and texture of language rather than trying to homogenise it.

  11. Whinge may be evocative, and in common use Down Under. But here we are in the good old U.S.of A. and I have to ask whether authors (in other than a purposely vocabulary-building environment) should choose words that need to be looked up when there are close-enough synonyms that readers will recognize. Isn’t one of the functions of an editor to advocate to the author on behalf of the reader? Is the writer’s goal to celebrate the diversity and texture of language, or to communicate? Or have I been unduly Strunked and Whited?

  13. Your post brings to mind the first time a manuscript of mine was copyedited. I was so excited — I assumed the editor would do for me what I’d endeavored to do for my clients over the years: eliminate the errors that were invisible to the author and thus make the work better.
    About 25 percent of her changes amounted to valuable corrections, for which I was grateful. Another 25 percent were optional changes I chose not to accept. The remaining 50 percent? Introduced errors, including misspellings! Clearly, she looked up not *one word* in the dictionary. She relied on her own (frequently incorrect) mental dictionary.

  16. Carol, in a future post, would you mind sharing more information about how you were radiologically brainscanned at UCH?
    I’m curious whether the experiment involved monitoring your eye movements, placement of EEG electrodes on your scalp, insertion of brain probes, or even all three in combination with other strange technologies. (Lasers? Blood-borne isotopes?)
    In any case, it sounds like a fascinating experience. Please tell us more!

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