Shall I Drive This Writer Crazy? A Copy Editor Decides

February 21, 2012, 12:01 am

Photo courtesy of Jonathan

Although I may have a reputation for breaking the rules, when I set out to copy-edit a manuscript, my default tactic is to follow the stylebook until I have a reason not to. It’s the most sensible way to work. Since few writers are consistent in their stylings, few will object when I favor our house style and edit their departures from it accordingly.

Occasionally, however, a writer is relentlessly, reliably consistent in violating a style rule. And inevitably, I don’t notice the consistency until I’m a good way into the manuscript. After 80 or 100 pages, it dawns on me that I’ve been changing the same thing over and over … and over … and that the writer has never once diverged from the antistyle. Which suggests that the writer really likes it the way he wrote it.

What to do?

If the writer is flat-out wrong, I simply plug on with editing the error. This is rare. There aren’t that many flat-out mistakes that an educated writer will make consistently throughout a manuscript, as opposed to just flaking out here or there—although you might be surprised. For instance, one of my writers always put the period outside the parentheses, even when it belonged inside. (This is an example). Another writer always put a space before a semicolon and never after ;like that—no doubt the result of a find-and-replace operation that ran amok.

When the writer’s preferences are different from mine, but not actually wrong, I have to pause. It happened today. (You guessed that.) My current writer loves commas even more than I do, and he loves to join two independent clauses with a conjunction immediately followed by something parenthetical—but he never puts a comma before the conjunction, and he always sets off the parenthesis with commas. There are many, many such sentences: Sal Friday took a drag on her cigarette and, keeping an eye on the alley, she felt again for her .38. When she heard the switchblade open against her neck, she froze but, for the first time in her life, she knew what to do. (OK, that’s not exactly what I was editing today; I changed it slightly to protect the perp.)

About 80 pages into the manuscript, I realized that I had shifted such commas many, many times. The writer had not varied from this formula, and every time I saw it, I changed it: Sal Friday took a drag on her cigarette, and keeping an eye on the alley, she felt again for her .38. When she heard the switchblade open against her neck, she froze, but for the first time in her life, she knew what to do.

I would like this to be a right-or-wrong situation. I can defend my editing: It’s conventional to put a comma before a conjunction joining two independent clauses. The writer could counter that when the clauses are short, the comma may be omitted. He could also argue that it’s conventional to set off parentheticals with commas. To which I could say, extrapolating from rules about double conjunctions (and if, that if*), that it’s not necessary to express the first comma if the parenthetical follows a conjunction. A third party might argue for even more commas: Sal Friday took a drag on her cigarette, and, keeping an eye on the alley, she felt again for her .38. When she heard the switchblade open against her neck, she froze, but, for the first time in her life, she knew what to do.

Ultimately, what is editing but an endless series of little switchblades against the neck? I had to think fast: A good copy editor doesn’t waste time. Should I continue to impose my preferred style, or put everything back? Either way, assuming the original was consistent, I risked introducing inconsistency. But putting everything back would also be time-consuming. And maybe consistency was uncalled for in the first place.

Like Sal Friday, I knew what to do.

What I don’t know (yet) is how the writer will feel about it.

______

*Words Into Type, p. 196; CMOS 6.32; Strunk & White, p. 5 (section 4).

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Readers with questions about academic writing, editing, and publishing may e-mail Carol at AskCarolSaller@gmail.com.

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http://www.arrantpedantry.com Jonathon Owen

I recently worked on a manuscript with some consistent problems. The author went to great lengths to avoid ending sentences with prepositions, and he balked at our changing them. The author is apparently a little old-school and wouldn’t accept that ending a sentence with a preposition can be okay. Well, fine. We let him have his fronted prepositions. It’s his name on the book, after all.

In another case, an author consistently used which for both restrictive and nonrestrictive relative pronouns. One of our proofreaders dutifully changed all the restrictive ones to that—about four or five a page. It was a pretty ridiculous thing to be changing at the proof stage, so I stetted them all. It was a big enough waste of time and money to mark them all; it would’ve been a much bigger waste to enter all those changes in a typeset book. Besides, even if it sounded a little weird at times, it’s not technically wrong.

I’m all for putting the commas in before the conjunctions. Sure, they might technically be optional in some cases, but it’s a little jarring to see She froze but, with that poor but hanging there awkwardly.

dank48

”It’s his name on the book, after all.”

Or hers, of course: And imo that’s a very important thing to keep in mind when copy editing a ms. A sense of “ownership” is important for a production editor to have, but she or he has to remember whose name goes on the title page.

Charles Peters, founder of The Washington Monthly, once described the copy editor’s job on a periodical as “keeping the Old Man from embarrassing himself in public.” It’s similar for book editing. It’s been my experience that, the better the writer, the more copy editing is accepted and even appreciated by the author or, as the case may be, the title-page editor. Sometimes they even express gratitude at being “liberated” from some hoary superstition about sentence-starting conjunctions, sentence-ending prepositions, restrictive “which,” split infinitives, and the like.

After all, the author and editor have a common goal: the best book possible, given the constraints of budget and schedule.

http://twitter.com/HemmensBen Ben Hemmens

In any kind of formal prose I’d say a correction is necessary. The commas only after the coordinator are liable to irritate readers after a while.

I might just drop the comma after the coordinator without necessarily adding one before it; but maybe that’s a BrE tendency.
mbelvadi

Professionally edited published work lays the foundation for shifts of acceptable usage. If you don’t correct the errors, you are adding to the evidence that future language users/grammarians will look for that they aren’t errors at all. After all, they were allowed to remain in a serious, professionally edited work!
breader

For my most recent book project, I had the pleasure of working with a copy editor who contacted me after each chapter with questions regarding style and vocabulary. She kept a style manual for the book project, and added/changed items as we moved through each chapter. The process was vastly superior to the copy editing on my previous book, which happened without any involvement from my end, and which in turn resulted in a great number of unwarranted changes that I cringe at to this day. And that irked me, because I also am a copy editor and an editing teacher.

The copy editing process always should be collaborative to some degree. That may not always be possible in a “hot news” situation, but in such cases the reporters and copy editors generally have an established rapport already, and the text is relatively ephemeral anyway — it won’t be around long enough to sweat over a misplaced comma here or there. With the glacial pace of academic publishing, particularly book publishing, there is no need or justification for autonomous editing.

I think the single best answer to “Should I continue to impose my preferred style, or put everything back?” is “Talk it over with the author.” That would be time well spent.

dottyeyes

I agree with breader. Contact the author. Since he seems to be consistent, and since you were following standard grammatical practice, I’m guessing that the author would understand and appreciate your present dilemma. His consistency suggests he cares about good writing; he may very well agree to have you continue modifying the commas per standard editorial practice. But if he feels strongly about how he punctuated those sentences, then you know you have your work cut out for you. A global search for “, and” and “, or” and “, but” will at least save you some time, though I realize that this would pull up serial sequences, too. Please tell me you’re not editing on paper!

what4

Has anyone conducted research to test whether minor inconsistencies make any difference in reading comprehension or the reader’s judgment about the credibility of the work? On the internet, readers shift from one set of conventions to another without difficulty. Why not within the same work?

dottyeyes

Here’s my admittedly weird analogy. When I was a renter, I always cleaned the apartment when moving out before having the landlord inspect it. It always looked clean, and I always got my deposit back. One time, however, I decided to go over the little nicks in the white woodwork baseboards with a little white paint. (Many of the nicks, part of normal wear and tear, had been there when I moved in.) This landlord later praised the apartment as being the cleanest he’d ever seen it. My conclusion: You’d never have noticed the little dark spots in the woodwork, but once they were cleaned up, there was the general sense of a well-done apartment. And that’s how I feel about editing. The general reader might not be able to point out an errant comma or a bit of wordiness or rough syntax, but when these minor things are mostly removed, the reader has a sense of a well-written book.
George Grenley

My survey of one reader (me) says “Yes, it does matter.” I do shift among styles on the Internet, but within one ‘theme’ or document or what-have-you, variations in style are a speed-bump. Do not underestimate your mind’s ability to subtly perceive patterns.

ulyssesmsu

First, get rid of Strunk & White.
siskin

I like your wayward writer because the subject (as in nominative case) doesn’t change. I follow this rule and, presumably to the consternation of editors, I do so throughout a manuscript. My thinking is that I wouldn’t have used the comma if I didn’t have the parenthetical phrase.
Timothy_OBrien

This author’s comma style seems perfectly acceptable to me. Especially as s/he is following this choice consistently, I see no justification for changing.

I’ve always felt that writers who have a clue what they are doing should be spared from most (almost all) copyediting “rules.” However, your choice is also reasonable, and if I were the author I wouldn’t make a stink about it. (And maybe I would learn something from it.)
http://profiles.google.com/2pence Penny Mayes

Is the writer British?
I was taught never to place a comma before a conjunction, your writer’s style makes perfect sense to me when read aloud.
http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100000467365925 Liana Krissoff

I find both the author’s and the editor’s versions awkward. Here’s how I’d do it: “Sal Friday took a drag on her cigarette and, keeping an eye on the alley, she felt again for her .38. When she heard the switchblade open against her neck, she froze, but for the first time in her life she knew what to do.” There’s no reason for the comma before “and,” since there’s no real change in subject. If there’s a rule somewhere about always or never using commas before or after conjunctions, it should probably be broken at least half the time.

lazybones

Your version of the first sentence is the same as the original. Did you mistype it?

http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100000467365925 Liana Krissoff

It’s close, but not the same. I would put a comma before but not after “but.” And I wouldn’t use a comma after “life.” I think this is a more open punctuation style, and if the author were consistent in using a closed style I’d leave it alone as long as it was done correctly—more like the third example given, but with no comma before the “and.”

picky

Crazy! There was no error in the original – leave the poor fellow’s style alone! That’s the sort of unnecessary fiddling that gives editing a bad name.

big_giant_head

Are you kidding? A comma after a conjunction makes me want to bite someone.

lazybones

Just like that, eh? All the time? A rule trumps readability every time? Pah.

lazybones

My view, for the little that it’s worth, is that the second version (‘cigarette, and keeping’) damages readability by favouring a convention for a ’comma before a conjunction joining two independent clauses’ at the expense of a convention that to my mind is more relevant for readability: ‘to set off parentheticals with commas’. The third version (‘cigarette, and, keeping’) honours both conventions, and I read it easily, but I find the original version the most natural.

Reading Carol’s preferred version, I experience a mental jar when I reach the comma in ‘alley, she felt again’ and have to go back and re-parse what the comma indicated was the parenthetic ‘and keeping an eye on the alley’. I notice this usage in real life, and it always jars (which is why I notice it): a parenthesis with only a closing comma is an unlovely and unnatural creature.

As Carol says, these are mere “conventions”; and, since different people have different conventions, you will never please everyone. There can be no universal justification, so I agree with Timothy O’Brien’s comment that ‘writers who have a clue what they are doing’ should be left to follow their own conventions. I hope Carol feels the same. Her writing this post shows she has leanings that way, but for some reason she shies away from revealing whether she decided to let the author have his way or start a (surely pointless) battle of conventions.
dottyeyes

Do the following examples clarify why Carol’s commas are standard American practice? The first sentence might make you pause, whereas the second one doesn’t. (I’m not saying that this punctuation must be adhered to slavishly, but I’m just offering the examples as food for thought.)

1. The fruit stand sold apples and, for the first time that season, peaches
were unavailable.

2. The fruit stand sold apples, and for the first time that season, peaches
were unavailable.

http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100000467365925 Liana Krissoff

They both make me pause, actually. The first because the subject changes, so ideally you’d have a comma separating the two clauses. In the second, I’d either take out the second comma (for an open style) or add another one after and (for a closed style, though that would make it quite chunky). The way the second version stands, you don’t automatically know that the sentence will continue after the parenthetical. “The fruit stand sold peaches, and for the first time that season” is a perfectly acceptable sentence on its own.
JohnKeahey

Rewrite it thus: The fruit stand sold apples, and peaches were unavailable for the first time that season.

lazybones

Rewriting one sentence does not progress these discussions; you can always rewrite. Do you think Carol should have rewritten every such sentence?

However, even rewritten the example sentence makes no sense to me, since I want “and” to be “but”: “The fruit stand sold apples and (had) no peaches” is not English that I recognise.

splitinfinitive

What did you do? Color all of the This Particular Situation commas that you add green, or whatever, so that the author could (or you could) delete the entire species at one time if you made a deal to leave them out? But going back through and finding all the already added commas would be time consuming and tricky; maybe those should stay as is, for the author to reject one by one while reviewing the revisions, up through the start of the green commas.

This also brings up the question of whether copy editors should require a surcharge or bribe for working under style conditions that they don’t approve of. (I’m thinking of a sliding-scale small-medium-large mocha latte surcharge system.)
odarp

This really is editing-as-diplomacy. Is the writer a prima donna, or one who’s grateful for the copy editor’s help? It seems that talking to the writer is the only way to know.

But regarding the present problem: Comrades, consider taking a step back (especially if the writer is NOT a prima donna). Does any of us swear to leave the writer’s sentence breaks inviolate? Aren’t our first responsibilities to the reader and publisher rather than the writer? I ask these questions because I think that if God were copyediting that passage he’d turn the writer’s two sentences into four: “Sal Friday took a drag on her cigarette. Keeping an eye on the alley, she felt again for her .38. When she heard the switchblade open against her neck, she froze. But for the first time in her life, she knew what to do.”

When I was copyediting full time, I often found that when two alternatives (like keeping the writer’s unorthodox commas versus making the sentences comma-heavy) both looked bad, the answer was to do something else entirely. (Or delete the sentence! Boy, that worked an awful lot of the time.)

22108469

It seems that the copyeditor’s first and only responsibility would be to the entity paying for the work.
Timothy_OBrien

Totally agree with breaking up that long sentence, especially at “But for the first time in her life…”

ebb11

Did anyone ask whether this was fiction or academic writing? I think it would make a big difference.
kigale

I don’t know which rocked my world more – to learn that it’s okay to end a sentence with a preposition or to see how many people can get so worked up about, and how much time can be spent discussing, commas. OK you pedants – have at it. I’m sure that these two hyphens are driving you crazy and I just fed you some more commas to mess with (as opposed to more commas with which you may – or can – mess).
odarp

To kigale from a once full-time copy editor: We are a peculiar crowd and can appear pedantic, but when publishers employ us and we do our job right, our fretting over hyphens and commas ensures that what you read is clear and smooth even though the writers may not have submitted it that way. We are analogous to those who perform other unobtrusive services for you, like cleaning the toilets you use, shoveling the sidewalks on which you walk, or hanging your wallpaper perfectly straight—services that involve some self-humiliation. To take advantage of that humiliation by sneering at those who do such tasks is certainly tempting, but I don’t think it’s very decent or humane.
tedpease

This is tedious. As an editor (inserts as many friggin’ commas as you want here) I couldn’t even read this.