What’s So Hard About Reading a Cover Letter?

January 12, 2012, 12:01 am

Photo: Jessica Lucia

Honestly, what is it about writers of scholarly books that makes 33.4 percent of them* think they’re above reading instructions—never mind following them—when they receive an edited manuscript or page proofs? Don’t they ask their students to follow directions on exams? Don’t they sit on dissertation committees that require conformity with a set of instructions? Haven’t they been told since kindergarten to follow the rules?

It’s not as though proofreading instructions are arbitrary and frivolous. Rather, they allow precise communication of a writer’s intentions. Following them prevents expensive typesetting errors and charges for excessive alterations to proof. Although copy editors may have various pathetic ways to assert power over writers, requiring them to read a cover letter and follow the instructions is not one of them.

Three true stories:

—Professor A copies me on a panicky e-mail to her freelance copy editor (subject line URGENT MESSAGE!) reporting that she isn’t able to accept or reject the tracked changes in the edited manuscript. The freelancer copies me on the reply: “Yes, the files have been locked on purpose, as I indicated in my cover note to you. We do not want you to accept or reject the changes. Merely indicate whether the changes are acceptable to you, and then when you send the files back to me, I will unlock the MS and accept or reject the changes based on your review. Here, again, are the instructions. . . . ”

—Professor B writes a huffy message complaining that he cannot find the notes in the edited MS I sent him. I reply that I took them out of his separate notes file and linked them individually to the callout numbers in the main text file, embedding them electronically. He replies with sarcasm that I might have told him. (From my cover letter: “I have embedded the notes electronically so they’re tied to the corresponding location in the text. I’m noting it only so you won’t be startled by it.”)

—Profs S through Z (I’ll spare you C through R) return their page proofs in reasonable shape—except for flat-out ignoring my cover-letter instruction that added text be compensated for by cutting an equal amount of text nearby, and vice versa. In some instances, they add whole paragraphs, perhaps expecting that the printer will simply tape a little flap into every book as it’s printed.

And then there are writers who do read and follow the instructions, but manage to introduce complications that weren’t explicitly prohibited. This made me think that I should start compiling a list of don’ts for my cover letter:

Please don’t write all your changes on yellow stickies instead of on the MS or proof.
Please don’t make corrections to your original Word files and send them as a replacement for the edited MS.
Please don’t wait until the day after the proofs are due back and then offer to read me all your corrections over the phone.
Please don’t scan your proofs at 25 percent and send back a two-sided printout with two proof pages to a side.
Please don’t staple strips of retyped sentences over the sections you want replaced.

My usual practice is to attach my cover letter and a PDF of the proofs to an e-mail in which I beg the writer to read the cover letter all the way through, “even if your eyes begin to glaze over,” and I explain why this is important. But on the theory that the problem begins with an unthinking arrogance on the part of the writer (Who me? Take instruction from a copy editor? I could do this in my sleep!), I’m wondering whether I might get better results if I simply wrote, “If your marks on the proofs are nonstandard, you may incur typesetting charges. Let me know if you need any help.”

______

*If I don’t cite a source when I give a number, it means I made it up, but it doesn’t mean it’s meaningless. All estimates are based on 20.8 years of editing and include a .75 multiplier to offset exaggeration from frustration.

~ ~ ~

Readers may send Carol questions about academic writing, editing, and publishing. Write to her at AskCarolSaller@gmail.com. (Please ask questions about Chicago style here.)

This entry was posted in Academe, Editing, Mistakes, Writing. Bookmark the permalink.

http://www.arrantpedantry.com Jonathon Owen

I think I’ve dealt with every item on that bulleted list. I could feel my blood pressure rise as I read through it. Some authors really do have a gift for finding ways to complicate the process. Luckily, the majority of authors are great to work with. But those other ones . . .
maw57

Oh, the poor publishers. Maybe we need an article on the decline of production values in academic books owing to cutbacks.
http://www.facebook.com/pez.dispens3r Justin Boden

“Who me? Take instruction from a copy editor? I could do this in my sleep!”

Perhaps it’s not so much that they look down on copy editors, so much that copy editors are a scarce, pedantic breed who simply pay attention to things that boorish academics wouldn’t. Like instructions.
julievp

“If your marks on the proofs are nonstandard, you may incur typesetting charges. Let me know if you need any help.”

I used to think this kind of language seemed rude in a cover letter, but now I always include some kind of variation on this theme. I think it happened somewhere around Professor M, who, at 2nd proofs, gave me the “please replace chapter 5 with the attached new version” line. At least he said please!

Nice post – Julie VP
anon1972

Ha, I feel for you. As a first-time author, I have been slavishly following instructions from my editor for fear that doing otherwise will have awful repercussions! I shall be sure to read the instructions that come with my page proofs EXTRA CAREFULLY.

I think it would be fine to write “If your marks on the proofs are nonstandard, you may incur typesetting charges. Let me know if you need any help.” Nice and clear! You might even add a clause to the first sentence: “…, so please read the instructions carefully!”
http://twitter.com/TrnsformEditing Jill Sulam

“Please don’t make corrections to your original Word files and send them as a replacement for the edited MS.”

The very idea of this makes me feel slightly faint.
jrscholar

To be fair, we, as a group, don’t tend to read instructions on the front end, either. As a member of an editorial board for a journal, I see a good number of manuscripts that suggest the author never took a brief look at our style guide.
http://twitter.com/biobabbler biobabbler

Re: “Please don’t make corrections to your original Word files and send them as a replacement for the edited MS.”

Yes, yes, YES.

Re: “Please don’t staple strips of retyped sentences over the sections you want replaced.”

Really? That’s a riot. =) Well, hello, 1982. How have you been?
22108469

The idea that freelance copy editors are gleefully “exerting power” over academics and their prose strikes me as some sort of paranoid fantasy. Working from a cluttered corner in a tiny home with never-fast-enough Internet, no air-conditioning, and none of the positives of working in a publishing office (the negatives are not part of this particular rant) doesn’t offer a sense of power–quite the contrary.
sand6432

You might want to write another column about the (many) authors who fail to read their contracts and have to be reminded to read them when they raise questions about matters that are already covered there.—Sandy Thatcher
http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=7600006 Mary Davenport Davis

Please keep these posts coming. As a Ph.D student with nothing published yet as well as a sometime freelance copy editor, they are really helpful. (And also funny.)
http://www.facebook.com/joyce.bond1 Joyce Bond

This is why when sending back edited files for author review, I now type a short bulleted list of the most important instructions right at the beginning of the edited Word file itself–in the first file of a single-author book or in every chapter of a multiauthor book–using tracked changes so it most likely appears in red at the very top and gets their attention. And you know what? This has worked wonderfully!

I include don’ts from previous bad experiences, such as “Don’t write your responses to queries in a separate file.” I’ve had authors type their responses in a separate file as “1. No, 2. Yes, 3. OK,” etc., with no indication of which specific query they are replying to or what page it’s on. They number the replies sequentially as 1, 2, 3, etc., which doesn’t correspond to anything in the original file. Worse still is when they missed a query or two in their review, which throws off the whole rest of the list of answers. I got to the end of the list after transferring their responses to the original and find I still have remaining queries in the original file. Time to tear my hair out! Anyway, the list of dos and don’ts at the beginning of the file itself has helped substantially.
Guest

If we had to learn to tie our shoes by reading instructions, we’d all wear loafers. Routines that editors find automatic may not, in fact, be as transparent as you seem to think.

It is a great joy to work with a knowledgeable and intelligent editor, someone who cares as much for the work as for a glitch-free production process. It is painful to be stuck with one who considers writers idiots. Writers are the ones who have to live with the editorial scars inflicted upon us by a hasty production process driven by arbitrary deadlines. Yes, some writers are idiots, but frustration exists on both sides of the process.

Once upon a time I asked for a change in a manuscript that the copy editor considered unnecessary and expensive, so I faxed her a twenty dollar bill. Want one?
nkharlamov

Last night I was reading with horror the story of Alan Gilbert stopping performance of Mahler’s 9th at NYPhil because someone’s cell phone was ringing incessantly. Something tells me that students eating lunches in computer classes, authors ignoring the cover letters, and patrons forgetting or worse, unwilling to, turn off their cell phones at symphony halls – not to mention people chatting to bus drivers while the bus is going at full speed – are all instances of the same general phenomenon…

http://www.facebook.com/people/Carol-Saller/100002198727755 Carol Saller

I can testify that at least the cover-letter thing is nothing new . . .

http://job-resume-templates.blogspot.in/ Steven Cruiser

If the format would be simple then the recruiter wouldn’t feel so hard to read it.
dmariemarks

Mentioning money always seems to makes a writer pay attention.