Who Copyedits the Copyeditor?

A great deal of my professional life involves writing, so the prospect of copyedits on a book manuscript conjures a special kind of fear and loathing. I’m also a writing instructor, of both fiction and expository writing, so my need for imagined mastery is even higher.

Based on a range of past experiences, copyedits fall into two camps: those that humble, and those that enrage.

Happily, my most recent bout involved only the first.

The most recent bout of a good friend (who will go nameless to protect both the innocent and the annoyingly guilty) involved only the second.

The title of this blog came to him while he was working through his copyedited manuscript, and he instructed me (twice) to use it for something, a short story, a novel, anything. Though probably not a blog post.

Fortunately, it’s too late to change the title of my book. The Color of Paper: Representing Race in the Comics Medium will be out next February – and will include remarkably fewer errors than the final draft I submitted in spring.

My first major experience with copyedits occurred a quarter century ago. An assistant editor sent the wrong draft of my first novel to the copyeditor. My editor ate the costs and sent the correct version. I didn’t know at the time how rare that was.

Funniest correction: For the penultimate flashback chapter, the (second) copyeditor inserted “had” in front of every verb. Literally every verb. My editor agreed only the first was necessary – a trick one of my MFA professors later taught our class.

My current book provides nothing as entertaining, but it was still instructive.

Things I learned:

1. Some ellipses have three periods and some ellipses have four periods, and there are rules for when to use each.

2. A war between good and evil is being fought over whether to capitalize or not to capitalize the first word in a quotation. I’m not going to be on the winning side, and that’s okay.

3. My instinct for when to hyphenate words is almost always wrong. If it were always wrong, I would know to always do the opposite of what I think is right. Almost always is worse, and also strange.

5. I have a startlingly impressionistic approach to other authors’ names. This is distinct from my many garden-variety misspellings (as when the copyeditor queries in the margin: “Do you mean ‘lacuna’?”). The root cause may be the same though: a dyslexic-related childhood learning disability, and the fiftysomething discovery that learning disabilities aren’t “childhood.” The fact that spellcheck doesn’t know the names of comics scholars doesn’t help. But I realize now that when I picture a name, I don’t see a row of letters; I see a semi-visual image composed of the idea of letters.

5. No matter how many times I use it, “predominately” isn’t a word.

Things I already knew:

1. I don’t think page ranges in Works Cited lists are necessary.

2. There’s a rule for when to use “that” and when to use “which,” and though I can’t articulate the rule, I know it. Except when I don’t.

3. Everyone else thinks page ranges in Works Cited lists are necessary.

4. It’s annoying to reference two works by the same author and not indicate which work in each internal citation. It’s especially annoying for copyeditors.

5. Page ranges in Works Cited lists are necessary.

Meanwhile, my good but unnamed friend (okay, it’s Nathaniel Goldberg, my three-time co-author, though at the moment we’re working on simultaneous solo albums, like Kiss did in 1978) has gained valuable practice composing clear and careful emails to editors regarding errors introduced by copyeditors.

Here’s an example:

“Some are easy enough for me to catch. However, others aren’t:

“1. Very often, commas required in the text for logical coherence were removed, and commas required not to be in the text for stylistic consistency were added.

“2. Very often, quotation marks/inverted commas (‘such as this’) were replaced with double quotation marks (“such as this”), which is contrary to disciplinary style.

“3. Very occasionally, the copyeditors added a word to a sentence changing the meaning of the sentence.

“Sometimes combinations of these occur several times on a page.

“Rather than my having to correct the copyeditors’ mistakes, can they be corrected at your end to their original, correct form?”

We both have completed reviewing our copyedits and sent them back to our editors. First proofs should arrive by the end of summer.

I strongly intend not to write a sequel blog post titled: “Who Typesets the Typesetter?”