(The Subversive Copy Editor)
(The Subversive Copy Editor)
Recently I read through a book to make notes for a professional voice actor who would be reading it for an audiobook production. Luckily, she turned out to be a genius at reading my mind and dodging most of the…
A few months ago in a conference session, a group of novelists digressed into good-natured complaints about being copyedited. One writer drew a lot of laughs saying, “I mean, I got A’s in English! I know where the freaking commas go!”* Others nodded in recognition and comradery. I bit my tongue.
“Hazel and I’s Puppy. The. Cutest. Ever.” In editing formal prose, we fix nonstandard English without hesitation. But in editing creative works, we often need to throw out the stylebook so a narrator or character in a novel or play…
In novels and stories and other creative works, words spoken by a character are normally set off from the narrative with quotation marks, and the speaker is identified in the run of text by tags like “she said.” This is…
Although I officially retired from my work at the Chicago Manual in December, I couldn’t say no to an opportunity to continue hanging around the CMOS Online Shop Talk blog when Russell Harper—the new editor—invited me to share a new…
Do you ever find at the end of workday that even though you know darned well you weren’t slacking for even ten minutes, somehow you didn’t make any progress in editing your manuscript? Or do you ever try to explain…
This morning I was looking at a writer’s website and once again wondered about an anomaly I see all the time in author bios. You know what I mean: those short blurbs that appear on book jackets, at online bookstores…
[Clarification from Carol Saller: As an editor over sixty in frequent conversation with many other older editors, I consider it appropriate to ask these questions. I ask them of myself. I don’t presume to question anyone else’s skills. Readers may…
Like all professional copyeditors, I try to keep up with news in my field, which means browsing the posts and articles of editors, grammarians, linguists, and lexicographers online. I do this both through RSS feed subscriptions—Feedly is my reader of choice—and also…
Because I’m often asked for advice on how to submit a children’s book to a publisher or agent, I’ve developed a set of suggestions. Here they are—feel free to add your own suggestions in the comments section below.