What's your worst (or best) editing experience?

[Phyllis]

Mine was when I was asked to 'co-write' an article on the history of Pouce Coupe (rhymes with loose Snoopy,) the village where I live. I was a young museum curator at the time and had full access to the historical data. I gave the reporter an article free of spelling and grammatical errors. She offered to add my name under her byline.

She added a brief introduction and copied the article. She filled it with spelling mistakes, everything from my name to historical figures and places. It was so bad I hoped people might not recognize it as something I 'co-wrote.'

This happened before computers took over but I've always wondered why the paper's editor didn't proofread the article.

[Broos]

Misspelling the name of a co-author is pretty far up there, as far as lazy mistakes are concerned. That's pure cheese.

I've been pretty lucky when it comes to editors. They've gotten a few things wrong over the years, but they've been right more often than they've been wrong, and kept me from looking really stupid more than once.

[Mike]

My worst experience as an editor was with a reasonably prominent journalist who was contracted to do a nonfiction series with the publishing house I worked for at the time. She had no idea how commas worked. None. I resorted to stripping out all the commas in her submitted files with find-and-replace and then going through and adding them in where they belonged.

I made the mistake of telling my boss I was doing this, and she for some unfathomable reason passed it on to the author, who flipped out. I was forbidden to do it any more - so I went back to deleting them one at a time.

Some manuscripts you can only improve so much.

[Phyllis]

I read somewhere that among an editor's pet peeves are repeat authors who keep making the same errors in subsequent manuscripts. When my last editorial evaluation came back with that section marked, 'the manuscript is remarkably free of spelling and grammatical errors,' I was elated. It mentioned I was a bit heavy on the commas, something I'm becoming very careful with...but at least I have an excuse because of that concussion I sustained in the nineties. It's taken a long time to get back to this point. Improvement is mandatory.

[Lil]

The worst editing experience I have ever had was when I took on a freelance job by an aspiring author. I wound up advising her to strip out whole sections of dialogue and replace them with more modern sounding language because every word she'd written as dialogue sounded as though it was straight out of a seventies' blaxploitation movie. All slang and it was horrible. I tried my best to do it in a gentle manner just by asking her if she spoke to her friends and other people like that. She didn't; she was actually very well-spoken, which, after reading what she'd written, I had to say surprised me.

Before I was 1/4 of the way done, she decided to have a college professor friend of a friend do the editing, because she wouldn't have to pay him to do it, unlike when she hired me. I hate to say it, but I was never so glad to delete something in my life.

[Phyllis]

Lil wrote: "The worst editing experience I have ever had was when I took on a freelance job by an aspiring author. I wound up advising her to strip out whole sections of dialogue and replace them with more mod..."

Authors really need to watch what they read. If you're consistently reading the same kind of writing it can rub off on your own work. I grew up reading a lot of older books published in Britain. When I started to review 'Been Blued' I discovered there were several sections that would have come across as sounding pompous to today's readers. Fortunately that was before I sent it in for the first editorial evaluation but three novels later and it's still something I have to watch for.