[In a way, doing this seems a distraction, while on the other hand it has a clarity reflecting my many years of labor in this field. Discussion online about the credibility of editors seems to make it called for. Edited 5/14/12. Two important additions are set off by asterisks.]
Subsections below are:
Is the editorial world part of academia?
Is medical editing, or medical media, part of the medical profession?
How are professionally-oriented editing jobs—as for educational publishers or medical-media firms—the same as, or different from, editing for fiction?
What about style guides?
What is atypical about medical-advertising agencies’ use of editors? [section started]
I have been aware for some time that some of the people to whom I’ve sent speculative queries about opportunities for editing work, and even some people with whom I’ve actually done this work, are not quite sure what editing is. And there are places online where the discussion seems on the passionate side and interesting, but sometimes misses points (cf. the Writer Beware blog entry of May 4, 2012).
Just a very few quotes will help put my discussion here in context: Victoria Strauss, author of the blog entry just mentioned, says, among many other things (numerous of which are well-taken) in her entry (before the thread of comments), “Standardized services and a lack of specialization suggest either a dearth of professional experience, or an editor who provides a widget-like service.” I presume the “standardized services” and “lack of specialization” she refers to have to do with editors who hold themselves out as serving trade-book authors, especially those of fiction, which I am not. But I am at a loss to understand what “widget-like service” is—I don’t know what this is, and I don’t think any other editor I’ve worked with (the vast majority of whom don’t work on fiction) would characterize his or her own work, or even that of a disparaged peer, as “widget-like.”
Another contributor to the Writer Beware discussion, Frances Grimble, says (in thread, May 9, 1:14 p.m.), “…[S]tyle guides such as [the] Chicago [Manual of Style] alert you to a huge number of details that you should be aware of and which usually have little to do with the author's voice. For example, a mostly otherwise good book that a friend self-published contained things like, one paragraph where the same term was hyphenated in three different ways. My first editing instructor used to say that consistency is the hobgoblin of tiny minds--and of copyeditors.” This is useful to refer to when I talk about some details of editing below (by the way, the literary allusion she makes is to Ralph Waldo Emerson’s remark that “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds”).
Having worked in the field for more than 20 years, I will give my take on it, first describing it in a sort of “intensional definition” way—meaning, verbally; generally; as a matter of general precepts—and then in a sort of “extensional” way, i.e., giving examples—because editing is one field where you learn bits of it, and see both “best practices” and instances of bad practice or innovative but optionally adoptable practices, as you go along. The essentials you need for your own work in it, I think, can be learned in two or three years, through practice; but in some confined sense, the learning continues for many years.
Levels of editing. There are different levels of editing, and it seems a lot of interested people know this: substantive or developmental editing deals with making suggestions for, improving, or changing an item of written work that are fairly macroscopic: dealing with how the piece treats its subject, what more it might do, etc., in broad terms. This isn’t changing a few words here or there, or making it conform rigorously with some style.
Copy editing (I’m talking the professional types of editing I know; line editing as for trade books is different) involves a range of things: more-substantive but still minor changes for a work that goes beyond simple proofreading; or perhaps reshaping the prose to fit some “house style” or a style sheet for a specific account or product, etc.
Proofreading is more a matter of catching errors—in spelling, subject/verb agreement, punctuation.
In practice, specific jobs can blur the line between copy editing and proofreading. This sort of fact is one of the conspicuous, minimal things you learn, as from the Editorial Freelancers Association, if you’re serious about an editing career. In the EFA’s booklet Occupational Hazards: Problems Frequently Encountered by Freelancers (1991; ISBN 1-880407-06-X), in the section “Jobs that Aren’t What They Were Supposed to Be,” it is noted, “The most frequently occurring situations are the copyediting job that turns out to be a rewrite and the proofreading job that turns into copyediting.” [italics mine]
These sorts of blurred-borderline situations occur because the manager in charge of giving it to you and outlining it either didn’t know how complex the job would be or was trying to foist something off on you that was more than you were led to expect. Of course, typically, copy editing costs more (per hour) than proofreading, so if a proofreading job turns out to be really copy editing, you can renegotiate what you’re being paid (this sort of situation really depends on the company, or context…).
Anyone whom I might approach about possible editing can always ask about the differences between these types of editing, and samples of each (by me or otherwise) can be provided.
Editing is contextual. Importantly, editing is a contextual, relative process, at least in the academic, professional, and news-media worlds. You do the work per the requirements and prerogatives of the specific company. Style rules (if they are used) vary from company to company. Sometimes a standardized set of rules (like those of the American Medical Association, or AMA) is deviated from, in certain ways, within a given company. How use of your time is made—as to whether it suits you—and whether it seems to make much sense from the business’s perspective can vary quite a lot, sometimes being on the incomprehensible or insulting side. Editing is a very pragmatic, and sometimes exploitatively used, work-function.
Let me dispel a few myths about editing, as seem relatively common, while only gradually incorporating some illustrative examples.
Is the editorial world part of academia? Absolutely not. Though I have an affinity for it because of having been academically inclined when young, I do not do it for that reason, and there are many things absent from the editorial world (for this blog entry, “EW”) that are saving graces to the academic world (“AW”). *(The following discussion applies mainly to freelance editors.)*
(Once, I encountered a former schoolteacher of mine, a nice woman who is now deceased, who said when she heard I’d been working for an educational publisher that I was “part of us” now. I forget what I responded, but I would have—in her case—been gracious in tone and logically tailored to the conversation in making some of the points that follow.)
First, you don’t always advance in your career based on good work in the EW, as you do in the AW. In fact, as far as I’ve seen, major changes (not for the better) in job arrangements in the EW almost never have to do with quality of work, but with whether a given media company can still use you for its purposes. (Also, “career” in the EW realm is a sum total of multiple places you’ve been; it does not refer to one job at one company.)
Second, there are no protections for EW workers (such as unions, or some board for arbitration or an ombudsman) as there are for AW workers (like teachers). When EW workers are freelancers, reliability of an employer vis-à-vis your getting pay when you need it can be a problem. On the other hand, there is more freedom (sometimes within constraints) for EW workers: if a company allows, you can make your own hours; you don’t have to be in a classroom at the same time each workday, and there are no obstreperous students to have to deal with (or suffer).
Third, you can edit in a range of areas: you can work for educational or reference publishers, medical-media companies, or periodical-publishing companies (newspapers or magazines). Your main challenge is being able to adapt to the company’s way of working (e.g., high volume of material, or deviations from style rules) and to learning different sets of style rules (AMA style for one company, AP [Associated Press] style for another…and these will be explained further below).
Also, one of the things I like about the EW is a sort of freedom (not a merely-whimsical attitude); one thing I didn’t like about the AW (while I took my work in it very seriously) was having to adhere to certain requirements, or study subjects or topics, that weren’t agreeable or interesting; and there was an element of alienation, boredom, and loneliness in it for me, which was partly my own fault. I have become more of an autodidact since the 1980s, and an EW work life suits this mentality more than does an AW one.
In short, editing blends (1) academic ways of being attuned to verbal complexities and rules and exercising skills therein with (2) business ways of doing things (and sometimes the aspect of business’s over-pressuring, unrealistic ideas, corner-cutting, and so on can seem to be a larger piece of the pie, and rather objectionable for that).
A little after-note: It’s been said on the Writer Beware blog and/or the Twitter account associated with it that teachers have the worst ideas of how publishing works. Even considering that this is said from a publishing perspective very different from mine, I would agree with it 100 percent. I am quick to say that teachers are among the most important members of society, not only for what they have to try to do with the young, but in how what they inculcate can serve you through most of your life. It’s not exaggerating to say that if it weren’t for teachers’ making me understand that success in schoolwork matters, that it can somehow lead to success in later life, I would simply have no life. Nothing else worked in terms of setting me up for life than teachers’ work: not family provisions in certain ways, not certain types of health-care professionals, no one else. That said, teachers’ precious value is something you hold dear as a past essential to your life, a past gift that keeps on giving; but, for one thing, teachers generally don’t know a thing about publishing, and if I have to hear one more of their grotesquely banal ideas on what this industry is about, I would prefer they (specific teachers I had) never speak to me again for as long as I live.
One teacher whom I’ve seen around town off and on for many years—who I never had as a teacher, though he had worked with my sister a fair amount in high school (he taught math in high school and also had been a disciplinarian of sorts there for a time, dealing with emergent problems at the high school)—saw me not long ago in a Burger King, and I was, generally, depressed/anxious about my financial situation (as I certainly wouldn’t have revealed to him in so many words). Somehow the issue of working in publishing came up. I had been in it, of course, for about 20 years. I was in the process of talking about how difficult it was to maintain steady income in the field. He started rhapsodizing about a young high school student he’d known not long ago who had written a beautiful something-or-other that had been published in a newspaper (not a school newspaper)—for free, of course (as letters to the editor, as I think this was, typically are). I rather stared at him in tolerating semi-disbelief. He rounded out the conversation with his barely hearing my point, general and the least I could fairly say, about the toughness of supporting yourself in the publishing field. It was almost as if he had made some ludicrously blunt remark about my racial background; you just felt you could not talk further with such a person on such a level. I thought that, from then on, I didn’t want to speak to him again. This wasn’t a personal matter, and in a sense he didn’t know better; but I cannot have my part in a difficult industry, which typically requires a dedication few people would give it, inadvertently disparaged by a truly amateurish understanding of it. Thanks, teachers, for all you do, but never talk to me about publishing.
Is medical editing, or medical media, part of the medical profession? I never thought so, but there are some within the medical-media field who seem to think otherwise. I will deal with this more with specific examples later. I consider myself a lay service provider to some aspect of the medical world, which is media, whether this means advertising or more or less academic works, or other. Of course, any doctor (or other learned professional in medicine) is free to interpret these printed works per his or her judgment; and of course, the products’ content is determined by many “players,” not just me as an editor (in fact, the most objectionable influence on them may be the business prerogatives of the pharmaceutical companies who are often the main ones responsible for them: they are the ones who may want focus on a certain aspect of an illness or a treatment, not the editor—who is no more responsible for this than a screw-turner on an assembly line is responsible for the design of the whole product).
Some who work in the medical media world (typically the younger ones) seem to get carried away with themselves, as if they are part of a high-and-mighty enterprise serving a holy mission—and their ego can get way out of bounds (in terms of demands or expectations, and even looking askance at you as a “contaminant of the holy process”—a key reflection of their amateurishness, I strongly think). Once I heard a young account executive type in a medical-promotions firm in Berkeley Heights, N.J., tell someone else that X was needed within a short timeframe—“Stat!”—meaning, he needed something as soon as possible; this was as if he had watched too many hospital/ER shows on TV. Let me assure you, no one should be saying “Stat!” in an editorial office. That is not the kind of place for that; we are not doing emergency surgery, and we are not medical professionals.
Another way to look at this is that, not long ago, I saw a medical-advertising firm’s Web site include some claim to following “best practices” within the firm. This is comical. A medical-media firm is not a medical-professional office; “best practices” are not what you would say is exercised there, even if the firm does try to hold to ethical standards. To me, anyway, what a medical-media firm can at most guarantee—as is the case with many media firms, medical or not, in view of the typical vagaries there—are “least objectionable practices,” not “best practices.”
How are professionally-oriented editing jobs—as for educational publishers or medical-media firms—the same as, or different from, editing for fiction? In some general sense, the editing is the same; proofreading marks, to take a trivial example, are, or should be, the same across all areas of publishing. And a certain facility for catching errors, with use of such marks, should be about the same. But obviously there are broad differences. I myself have rarely worked (done paid editing) on anything resembling trade books, or on other people’s fiction, but I know that in general it requires a different kind of mentality than is typically used in professionally-oriented editing. For one thing, there are highly sophisticated fictional works—such as by Toni Morrison, or many other esteemed authors we can consider—that require a certain eye and touch that I know I generally don’t have for another’s work. (I can, and prefer to [when it comes to fiction], edit my own fiction, but it usually takes a long time away from it to approach it with anything resembling objectivity and clear-headedness.) Less-sophisticated fiction may require a less sophisticated editor, but again, someone with a proclivity for that kind of work.
Someone who commented on the thread for Writer Beware blog’s May 4 entry spoke of having books published by a company that tended to impose a blanket style across books. This sounds like a thing that would be done by more professionally-oriented editing—almost as if the relevant company was publishing pamphlets rather than creative fiction. A fiction publisher that does that sort of thing would not be the type to publish the likes of Toni Morrison, and I think it is up to authors who aspire to write the kind of fiction that said company does publish to decide whether they would want to work with such a company or not.
Anyone who thinks that an editor may not be up to snuff, because he or she holds him or herself out to do a range of editing he or she is not qualified to do, or, worse, is even a “scammer”—a type of editor that I don’t think I’ve ever seen in the professionally-oriented editing field—should keep in mind that trouble can come for editors from writers too, and this is mainly because some writers can be amateurs, who either are naïve about what editing is or don’t realize that a given editor’s work is no guarantee of getting the work into print, and that that editor’s touch can be different from that of another editor who is also good for a range of types of trade books.
The rare few times I worked with such writers give interesting examples.
Work for a doctor-author. In 2009, an oncologist—a pathologist, specifically; this is a cancer doctor who diagnoses the type of cancer from a specimen—was referred to me by a marketing researcher with whom I’ve worked for over a decade. The pathologist—who had both an M.D. and a Ph.D., so she was no rube being rolled by me as a freelancer whom she never even saw—agreed to have me copy edit her Q&A-type primer on cancer (after we did some fairly thorough preliminary discussion via e-mail only). By the time she worked with me, she had already made preliminary arrangements with a publisher, an imprint (which I never heard of) of a large publisher (for which I had worked in the past) such as would handle such a work; but “there is still no contract,” she said. So she wanted to go ahead with editing, as by the likes of me. And, as far as how we started operating practically, I think it was because there was this sense that acceptance of the book, or the beginning of production, could be imminent (along with my dire situation workwise at the time anyway) that I became conscious of a need to be efficient with time. At one point she seemed to be foot-dragging, and I responded to her accordingly, always a tricky thing on the level of manners/diplomacy in this sort of situation. Then once work got underway, things seemed apt to go smoothly, at least in the early phase of things.
I made clear early on what the different types of editing were (and I think a key part of this preliminary info was how, in part, this meant different levels of pay for each). After reading her manuscript (and probably marking it) for the first time, not having spent a lot of time on it yet, I sent her a long memo where, among other things, I wrote, “…I am not trying every way I possibly could to deal with [a] market-oriented, macroscopic type of editing. That is more the province of ‘developmental editing’ or ‘substantive editing.’ … Here I am correcting simple, obvious errors; rewording where this seems appropriate; and trying to develop paragraphs better because the way you unfold a certain ‘argument’ or ‘anatomy’ of a little set of ideas seems a little confusing or incomplete.”
We also signed an elaborate contract I wrote up myself, based (in part) on examples of contracts I had from other companies. (I had her review the contract and give feedback as needed prior to signing.) I would say the way I handled this whole project was exactly as I would do it today, and it perfectly has a foundation in my approximately 19 years of editorial work beforehand.
As I recall without checking all my records, I did a certain large chunk of work, and the pathologist paid a large bill *[clarification: on sending the whole manuscript, she sent an initial large check, which ended up covering most of the work; this followed the retainer-style way I have of working for the consultant who had referred this client to me]*; then, after some further work (finishing up, I believe), there was a delay in her paying a last, small amount. Why a delay? She seemed, I inferred, disenchanted with the work; after I ended up feeling I had too much trouble getting the last bit of pay for what it was, she finally sent it (I don’t think she was being petty). All things considered, it’s safe to say she was disillusioned (maybe only as an initial reaction) with how much editing there was, or maybe with specific points of it. I don’t think I was unfair in the work. In fact, I would have said that at least 70 percent of it was essential to follow; for instance, she misspelled the trade names of certain medications (spellings would change within the manuscript), or there were other obvious style inconsistencies.
As I’ve implied, I made clear that even with my corrections (and assuming she rejected a few), this didn’t guarantee that her book would be published, but it would look better for editing. In this situation, there was even to an extent to which I did work that I did not get paid for—not that I blame her (this “partial free work” situation has occurred in every such instance of editing I’ve done—which also includes a book I copy edited lightly for Jason Aronson in 1994 and fiction I edited for a local amateur fiction writer in 1995).
In short, if the pathologist felt she was paying a little bit much for the amount of corrections being suggested, I gave her a bit of a break. To top it off, I did not charge the highest rate for such work that guidelines have suggested in such places as the EFA or Writer’s Digest. In fact, typically—for anyone for whom I would do such editing—I would require the medium level, or slightly lower, level of hourly pay (this is a matter of past practice; such things are always subject to negotiation). I would never seek to gouge someone with this kind of work. Editing is most certainly not an area, like lawyering, where the hourly rate is held to in an ironclad way, where if anything gets done to meet a solid criterion, it is the lawyer’s high-billing, not necessarily the work being done to the perfect satisfaction of the client.
Work for an amateur fiction writer. The second example is more droll, and suggests that a writer can turn out to be an eccentric you find you have to steer away from. The writer I did work for in 1995 was referred to me (innocently enough on his part) by Matthew Jones, a spirited editor I worked with at All American Crafts in 1990-91. The writer (who had apparently contacted AAC seeking an editor for his work) was an amateur, and had a notion to publish a series of short stories individually in whatever magazines he could try to get them in, then to get them collected into a book. This being 17 years ago, I am a little foggy on details, but he didn’t just want (and need) editing (presumably to make the stories more saleable), but they basically needed retyping, because he had typed them single-space, and they needed to be double-spaced (we were using typewriters then). (After a while he typed new stories for me to edit that were double-spaced, I think.) I am pretty sure I made clear that my work didn’t guarantee their getting published, but that it would make them closer to being acceptable at least in basic-mechanics ways (my work for him was essentially proofreading/copy editing, something I’d done at publishers to the tune of about 8.5 million words in 1990-94). Also, this was in the days when an aspiring writer still tried to write literature, not genre work, and his stuff was pretty much thematically in a sort of J.D. Salinger-or-thereabouts style, but I think they also had an O. Henry surprise-ending quality to them, too. (He had a day job, and lived in his own house, but seemed to think he could break out into a better life, or at least add to his life, with writing of published fiction.)
I think he made noise about the building cost—my rate at the time might have been no more than $12 an hour, with (I think) a lower rate for my time spent typing—and I ended up doing some final work for him for free, to cut him a break. Then he came up with one new story, while the others had already been done or almost done before he gave them to me. This new one seemed to have some recent inspiration: it was about a man dating a woman one night, and they have wild sex…and eventually (the next day or so) the man finds out the “woman” is either a transsexual or a hermaphrodite (I forget which), with a penis that had been hidden. I had a sudden icky feeling: was this writer commenting on our professional relationship? Did he feel he was getting “screwed” by some out-of-the-woodwork character of uncertainty sexuality, hence this “mirror” of a story was there for my do-you-recognize “reading pleasure”? I didn’t want to know. We cut off business amicably and I never sought to get work from him again, I believe.
In general, my working in professional settings where you meet the requirements of employers along lines that they set out and that you obviously have to be demonstrably equal to meeting eliminates a lot of odd problems, such as writers who are clients having unrealistic expectations or even being ready to claim you were taking advantage of them, even when you were giving them standardized service, with some time given free after a while.
What about style guides? This is one of the areas more widely misunderstood by people who have limited (or no) experience in publishing. For one thing, within the realm of professionally oriented publishing, there is no one “Queen’s English” for which there is some hallowed set of proper rules of grammar, etc. It always amazes me when I encounter people in the publishing realm who seem to think so.
First of all, style rules as they are used professionally are different from grammar and good writing style as you might see taught in a Strunk-and-White type of guide. Different types of publishing have different sets of style rules. For instance, newspapers often use Associated Press, or AP, style, which governs spellings of certain things (e.g., “Josef Stalin” for the historical Soviet leader) or certain constructions of phrases or the like. This is a matter of conventions, and AP rules, while particular on certain things, tend to simplify things a lot, as you would expect in newspapers. Incidentally, with (I would say) any trade book, no one should be applying AP style to prose there.
Further, the Chicago Manual of Style (which is associated, for more technical purposes such as styling references or end notes, with the Kate Turabian style manual for term papers) is famous for governing generally sophisticated published language—in humanities and other types of books. Among the style manuals I am familiar with, it comes closest to prescribing “Queen’s English” in the United States—but again, this is for the purpose of having a fairly uniform style for published works, not for prescribing “the best possible English in all circumstances.” For my own writing (and sometimes in select editorial-work situations), I may refer to it on subtle matters, such as when to capitalize the first letter of a clause following a colon within a sentence (specific examples make this situation clearer). As far as novels are concerned, I would think one would leave it up to a given publisher in a given publishing context to decide whether you should use the Chicago Manual. For some types of fiction writing (and even within nonfiction publishing), this manual seems too heavy-duty—like using a full set of court rules for the level of court in which you would need a lawyer, when you are only going to small-claims court.
Other sets of style rules are more germane to specific professions. The style guide of the American Psychological Association, which I’ve had reason to use rarely, offers the set of rules typically used for psychological publications (the real difference this makes can be seen in how references are styled, as cites within text or in a list of references at the end of an article or a paper). There is, I’ve heard, a set of style rules propounded by the American Management Association, which I have never had cause to use in New Jersey work, nor have I encountered anyone else in New Jersey using it; it seems something used in Manhattan contexts. (That is, as I found once back in the 1990s, when you said “AMA” style among Manhattan editors, they automatically assumed American Management Association, while New Jersey editors automatically assumed American Medical Association.)
There is one set of rules I have a book for, but which, as far as I’ve seen, is never used in any professional settings, and that is the MLA, or Modern Language Association, set of rules. This seems only applicable to school papers (and then I don’t think I ever personally used it myself when I was in school).
Another reference that seems, when you see the book, like an old-fashioned, maybe outmoded thing, Words Into Type, which is published by Prentice Hall. This is good, I’ve seen, for showing how to write clear prose for most professional purposes, such as when and when not to use commas. (It also contains a lot of useful info on the actual mechanical aspects of a book and its production.)
The New York Times has its own set of style rules (amusingly, when I was associated with the Editorial Freelancers Association, it seemed to be their fun parlor game to be on the lookout for when the Times made errors, and they sometimes noted these examples in their newsletter). One thing the Times has always done, which is not a style point I ever follow, is not to use a second serial comma: for example, they write “bell, book and candle” rather than “bell, book, and candle.” A somewhat similar thing is done in the Times with serial semicolons which, to me, creates confusion: they would write, say, for a list of three individuals with their hometowns, “…Joseph Sweeney, of Paterson, N.J.; John Jones of Montauk, Long Island, and Jason Smith of Providence, R.I.” Note that there is a comma after “Long Island,” whereas if you were rigorous in applying serial semicolons, you would have a semicolon there; but the Times uses a comma, as if there they apply their “lazy” deletion of lack-of-comma that they do in the serial-commas situation.
Style guides, as are other things in editing, are relevant to the companies using them, for their purposes, and the responsible editor learns what a given company needs and follows it as best as he can. He may not be perfect, but he will be adaptable as the profession requires. There is no “Queen’s English” applied in every corner of the Commonwealth, not in the U.S., anyway (for better or worse).
What is atypical about medical-advertising agencies’ use of editors? Editing in the realm of medical advertising has long had its own quirks, some of them troubling today in parallel with problems that have increased in the industry over the past decade. In addition to technical idiosyncrasies, the biggest problem with how editors are used is how the value of their work is applied. With every other area of publishing in which I’ve worked, the editor is understood to add value to the process of making a product. He does his work—as long as it meets the company’s requirements—and is paid for what it is worth (this can vary in line with [1] the editor’s experience, [2] what the editor tries to arrange for in terms of pay, and [3] what the company is willing to pay and/or what the industry at large tends to pay). Obviously, one would think that a company would not normally pay a higher-than-usual rate for the kind of editing the editor provides if the work did not serve the interests of the product (and its cost gets covered by the price of the product).
We’ll continue this section, and look at detailed anecdotes in this area, in Part 2 of this entry, whenever I get around to it.
