#Copyeditors

[theriu]

I am a professional editor - people pay me to make sure their writing is as correct and error-free as possible. I am not, however, being paid to proofread my own texts so they should not be held against me in a professional capacity

[recruit-g1]

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[haridraws]

I understand and respect copyeditors, but in my heart of hearts I think commas and hyphens should be vibes-based

[an-ruraiocht]

honestly a solid like. 70% of my complaints about books are that people don't care enough about sentences and details these days. not least all the writing advice that tells people they don't need to understand how grammar works because someone will fix it for them later which is entirely missing how copyediting has been devalued and farmed out to overworked underpaid freelancers who don't have time to fix your goddamn comma splices so they simply won't get fixed

so many books simply do not have good sentences. and they could. and they would be better books if they did. but publishing doesn't seem to prioritise that. line edits are cursory and editors often don't even really know how to make a good sentence themselves. copyedits get a quarter of the time they need to be thorough. everything is rushed and simple things are easier to fix so everything gets simpler and more generic

[powercycle]

elderly fandom blogger with a DNI/DNR in their about page

[elephantbitterhead]

Another fantastic set of quotation marks from the BBC:

As usual, I have no idea what this is meant to elicit from the reader -- although in this case it does raise doubts about whether this man liked his children.

Similar to other bizarrely quotation-marked words from some of my past exhibits, this word does appear in a quotation later in the article ("Mr Johnson had been described as a 'loving and amazing father, husband, grandad, brother and uncle'."), but I don't see why that means it should be in the subhead that way -- 'killing a father of seven' would have been fine & vastly preferable to the deranged alternative they've chosen.

[bloodbagzz]

being so brave and strong and applying for Jobs (evil)

[semperama]

I know we talk a lot about using too many commas, but you ever know a comma goes somewhere but refuse to put it there because it would ruin the flow of the sentence?

[daggerxmoth]

do we think crow rook comes up with their own little puns when naming poisons? and do we think viago gives notes on how they could be better?

[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

[theriu]

Guess what, gang? I've revamped my website to better showcase my freelance editing services and to just in general look more professional! I really like how it looks now, and I'm hoping to build a bit more of a clientele so I can do more of my favorite type of work, which is copyediting indie writers' novels. ^^

The site also has a blog I hope to update a bit more regularly, and a page of various short stories I've written (including many of my How To Guides For Mythical Creatures). Feel free to take a poke around, I'd love to know what people think! =D And if you or your writer friends need editing, you can reach me there or here on tumblr; I'd love to talk with you about your project. ^^

~River/Jenn

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[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.

[maerossi]

negative rant is negative; you've been warned

you know how as a society we generally feel we can judge people based on how they treat their waiters? I feel like I can judge authors based on how they treat their copyeditors.

Copyeditors' work is made so invisible by the publishing industry at large, and so many authors are content to treat us like garbage behind the scenes, never acknowledge our labor publicly, refuse to follow basic directions or frankly even read our emails, and then afterwards assume that any mistakes that make it into their book are our fault.

Sometimes authors put me in their acknowledgments, which is very cool beans. But the vast majority of the time, they publicly thank their husbands/wives/friends/neighbors for "copyediting" their book (aka someone untrained in editorial work read through a draft and pointed out where commas were missing; likely this feedback was about 0 to 30% accurate and possibly made more work for the actual copyeditor).

I'm currently working unpaid overtime on Memorial Day because someone's spouse "copyedited" their book, which in this case means they introduced hundreds of new errors into the manuscript after I had edited it. The book is very close to going to print, which means there is now a much higher chance that the book will print with a typo than it would have if the spouse had never touched it. Had the author read instructions or reached out to ask if this kind of thing was okay, we would have told them no. (The time to have your spouse scribble crayon all over your manuscript is frankly before you even submit it to publisher, not six weeks before the book goes to print.)

Meanwhile, the manuscript is bilingual, in Japanese and English. The author doesn't actually know much Japanese, though, so I, being bilingual, was able to correct literally thousands of Japanese errors, helping to protect the author's academic reputation. I wasn't actually paid to do this, since the publisher only pays for English copyediting. It was something I did for the author because I have the skillset to do so and because I care about linguistic accuracy in academic books.

And yep. Their spouse is in the acknowledgments as their "copyeditor," and I am not. I genuinely don't think they even noticed that I saved the Japanese in their book from being gobbledygook. Or they noticed but just think of me as like a robot-janitor-slave, so it didn't dawn on them to show any kind of thanks.

This was what I expected; it's the norm.

Before I started editing, I used to hear authors complain about bad editors all the time and just believe them. Now I know there is a world of unheard stories of terrible and frankly very stupid author behavior.

[the-walking-spoiler]

Apparently there’s people on here who follow me for Batman fanfiction reasons now. Sorry about the firefighter stuff but I’m locked the fuck in at this point

[sburbling]

not that some fic writers dont have skill on par with critically acclaimed novelists but like. some of the fics you people are raving about are not "better than the classics" actually. "this is the best piece of literature ive ever read" maybe you should read more books then