Different layers of editing in the massive project, and how this made
for the virtue of specialized tasks as well as opened up possibilities for
errors, or your own dissatisfaction in your work
Subsections below:
A decent exchange
with a teacher recently leaves some dissatisfaction
Overlapping with Paul during high school
Associating with Paul in volunteer park work
Chatting with Paul about whatever, “on the street”
The big
“fundamentalist” question he had about editing work
Responses I couldn’t
have made to Paul at the time, but which are abstractly apropos
The way (unexpected by laypeople) a professional editor reads
Not just spelling (of course!)
Seat-of-the-pants professional reading
The passing stupidity of the firm Science Temps
[For a list of links to Parts 1 through 3 and for Part 4
itself, see here. By the way, the set
of textbooks I’ve been discussing had the series title (furnished by Prentice
Hall), “Prentice Hall Literature: Timeless Voices, Timeless Themes.” Edit 6/11/15. Edit 6/13/15.]
Preface
I will turn, after some preliminary notes here, to a
description of the different levels of editors’ work on the PH School lit
project, which ultimately will lead to how Mike fit in when he arrived, for
those who are interested in his side to this (and some readers may like all I
say about the PH project apart from Mike’s part of it).
When I go through some talk about the technical side of
editing below, it may sound like I have an advanced degree in this. Actually,
all of this I learned “in the field.” You don’t learn this from school. (And
actually, the only person I ever worked with who majored in a “publishing” in
college—she was still a student at the time, in 1990-91—was one of the very
worst editors I’d ever worked with. She made a lot of mechanical errors, and
she was a bit lazy. She was a very nice twenty-something woman, but terrible
technically. This goes to show that when you do this work as a seasoned
professional, under the panic of needing to drag in the small-money pay, you
learn to get good at it any way but through school. [For another illustration
of someone of college age being not terribly equipped for the professional
arena of the print media, you’ll want to see the Appendix included in Part 8.])
Also, a lot of the below conclusions I have drawn over the
years in trying to dignify what I
did, because a lot of the work, especially as shaped by managerial demands,
entailed learning principles and methods by inductive reasoning,
after-the-fact, or “best approximate hypothesis” fashion, and learning in a
rapid-paced, sometimes frankly sloppy (if not flatly unethical) environment.
A decent exchange
with a teacher recently leaves some dissatisfaction
You know you’re in a respectable-enough professional field
when laypeople and other outsiders don’t have much of a clue, if any, what you
do and why it’s important. So even though one of my college majors was
philosophy, and I’ve had writings published on highly technical medically
related things, the fact that I often do, and still seek work in, proofreading
isn’t like I’m a professor who is slumming by seeking to sweep floors.
Overlapping with Paul during high school. Let me comment first
on the issue of teachers and the insider aspects of print-media work. If you
think you’ve seen it all from my background, you certainly haven’t. One story
of a long-running association I have with a teacher who worked at my high
school is very interesting, and our friendship is pretty good. Paul, I’ll call
him, I have associated with, sporadically (especially rarely in recent years),
since about 1989. He was an English teacher at my high school (where I
graduated in 1980), but I never had him as a teacher. As an extracurricular
matter (and not a matter of classes during the school day), he was head of the
drama department (whatever it was exactly called); when the school put on
famous plays, he was the head of the student group that did it.
Meanwhile, I was on the “stage tech” crew for about three
high school years; this meant I was among the students who worked behind the
scenes to construct scenery in weeks leading up to the performances, and
sometimes move scenery amid darkness on stage when it was necessary to do that;
and some of us were skilled in operating the stage lights. In short, we stage
tech sorts were a bunch of nerds—I don’t think many of us would today mind the
characterization—who were essential to school plays, but we were not on stage
in the spotlight—while there were other students cut out for, and enthusiastic
to do, that. Paul was in charge of them.
Another teacher (Mr. Bryan, who was a math teacher) was in charge of us in the
stage tech crew. And that activity, I think, was my first taste in working “in
the media,” along with my being an editor of the high school literary magazine
for two years.
I didn’t know Paul well during the play-staging years; the
actors and Paul were always a “group apart” from us stage-techies anyway. And
as I said, I never had him as a teacher. Yet, since he and I started
associating in about 1989 when he was in charge of a stretch of the Appalachian
Trail, which runs through Vernon Township, in terms of getting volunteers (including
myself) to help maintain it, that is how he got to know me.
Associating with Paul in volunteer park work. I joined him and
others (the others included other Vernon school-system teachers, at least one
of which I had had man years before as a teacher) on projects on the A.T.,
including what I’ve thought of in retrospect as a sort of Soviet tough-labor
project “in the tundra” in the mid-1990s, the task of building a suspension
bridge over the Pochuck Creek in a remote valley area. For that task, a big
number of us got our names in a special little booklet put out by the U.S.
Department of the Interior, I think it was. I would have to dig it out to
check. That bridge project—there were two phases I was on, in 1995 and 1999—was
tough (especially when operating a sort of engine-driven auger to put boardwalk
footings into tough, stony soil in summer heat), but it was rewarding. I’m
amazed to think how much I was involved with Paul in that group for us to get
to know each other in some limited but deep enough way.
Chatting with Paul about whatever, “on the street.” At
times—many times, in fact—I would encounter him at the Highland Lakes post
office and we would chat, sometimes about stuff going on in the town government
that may have related to the A.T. That association was how he got to know me
almost as if he could remember me from my high school days, which I would be
shocked if he specifically did.
And of course he taught at the H.S. for years after I left
it, but I think he’s been retired for some time now (as have been many of the
teachers I knew at the school in 1976-80). But he still teaches in some
capacity, maybe for some adult-aimed continuing education, I’m not sure.
He also knew (has known for years) that I’ve worked in the
print media, and we would have little chats on that from time to time.
Sometimes, depending on the stage of my career, I would be reluctant to tell
him much of what I was doing. Other times, I minded less.
So this is why we had an exchange two weeks or so ago where
we talked about something media-related. At first, I didn’t find some of what
he said offensive at all. Later, one point of his bugged me a bit in retrospect.
Food for a blog entry? If so, not an irascible one, I felt.
To be sure, he was not nearly as offensive as have been some
other “people on the street,” whether or not a teacher, who have talked to me
about the print media world and unwittingly showed they didn’t know a single
thing about it.
Before I reveal what Paul said, let me add this other
dimension to the story: he has long known a male, about my age, named Glenn S.,
who has been involved in various print-media projects both local and more
nationally oriented. I think Glenn even had one or more books published in the
traditional way. It was an irony that Paul would talk with me about Glenn
almost as if he was a natural yardstick by which to talk with me about what I
was doing, whether this made me look a little lax by comparison (or vice versa
regarding Glenn). Sometimes it seemed slightly rude, the way someone could hail
you on the street and start a conversation and then reference someone else, not
present, almost as if the other person was more interesting on some matter than
you were. But Paul wasn’t nearly as rude in this way as others have been.
Well, this particular occasion in May was very interesting:
Paul had a point to make, couched in a question, that led to us having—as I
freely supported—one of our longest conversations in a long time, about certain
“inside aspects” of the print media world.
The big
“fundamentalist” question he had about editing work
His point/question was this: how could an editor who wasn’t
trained in a highly technical area be able to edit the material? This came up
when I mentioned that, with my current freelance work, there could be some
material that was in areas (like chemistry or physiology, whatever scientific example
I used) that I didn’t know well, that I had to handle the best I could….
Yes, said Paul, how is it that an editor could do that
work…because, Paul elaborated a bit later, when he taught his writing classes,
part of the task was to learn to think….
And he meant that someone writing on a topic knew the topic inside and out,
could write about it (or presume to) because he knew it, was schooled in it
to some extent.
Some blog readers who work in the print media may know what
this gets at, which from their perspective may be more or less what I might
formulate if we did it in a less-than-friendly mode: Professional editors could
well work in areas that they aren’t “schooled” in; they have to follow their
wits to do the best they can, to “wing it,” and this is something that teachers
don’t understand, and seem quite naïve about. (There, that came out less barbed
than it might have.)
Adding to the irony of Paul’s point in May—and mind you, I
am not being sneering about Paul at all, just trying to flesh out my story as
fit for blog space—is that he, as before, mentioned Glenn S. again, this time
noting that Glenn was working on technical manuals related to some medical
something-or-other. As if that was really taking a risk in an area you aren’t
officially schooled in.
This was a bit amusing because, to me, now for once it was Glenn
who actually looked (as Paul inadvertently indicated) as if he was doing
something pretentious and afield from what he was “cut out for,” rather than
myself, as the comparison Paul might have made in the past might have
suggested. What type of manual Glenn was working on lately, I don’t know, but
one of my immediate thoughts was, “Oh, so the ‘wolf at the door’ meant that
Glenn himself now has to work in some medically related area, like so many of
us editors in New Jersey in the past 15 years or so.”
I made some remark to Paul, somewhat (or in some part)
sympathetic to him, about the types of ways you (as an editor) got into medical
material that left you some cause for pause (either about your own work or
about associates’ work); I made some reference to medical promotions as a
special area (at which Paul responded as if he could well see it was a rather
squishy area; maybe he got this from TV ads for the likes of erectile
dysfunction drugs). But let’s leave that area aside here.
This sums up a conversation that ranged over a lot of topics—in
terms of what type of work I’d done over the years and in terms of what remarks
Paul made from his own angle as a teacher.
As I said, I wasn’t offended at first by his naïve aspect of
making remarks about whether you were really schooled for an area you were
editing in. But as I thought about this over days, I was more given “a grain of
sand in my oyster brain to start making a pearl around.” Actually, in the past
I thought of writing about how teachers were really not cut out for
professional editing, based on other solid spurs. This conversation did not
fully fit that. But I can make some of the points I needed for this other
purpose, as tempered and related to Paul’s comments.
Responses I couldn’t
have made to Paul at the time, but which are abstractly apropos
A few succinct responses to Paul’s qualms about professional
editing:
* As an editor, you gain experience and skill in areas by
the sheer chance of what you can line up for work. When pressed by expenses
early in your career, you don’t always have the best choices. You take what
hiring managers give you. You learn about certain intellectual areas as you go.
As you get more control over your career as you get experience, you (as you hope) try to limit where you get work in,
to what you know best.
* Any professional, in fact, learns about areas via
experience. No one knows all they need to for a profession from what they get
at school. Teachers should know this, too.
* As an editor with my catch-as-catch-can experience, you
often end up working on stuff you can’t fully understand. But that need not
limit what work you can do. The first company I did work on nationally
distributed materials for, All American Crafts, had me work on knitting and
crocheting instructions, and I had no idea what that was about. If you look at
such instructions, with (in crocheting) such things as “sc” and a dot amid all
similar “code-like” abbreviations and such, you know it’s for insiders. What
does it mean? But my task was to make sure what was handwritten or typed on a
manuscript page was in the “copy” prepared more some stage of the
pre-publishing process. That I could do. It was like making sure phone numbers
on one page matched another. A person with a college education could do this.
* In the medical arena—first of all, one of my college
majors was psychology, which is a health-oriented field. In fact, I got awards
in my major for being among the top students in a major that had dozens of
students in the major. I still like to work on psychologically related
editorial “copy” because I know the field so well. Some stuff in different
medical subfields overlap—e.g., use of statistical concepts, or the nature of a
“controlled, double-blind” study and such. When you finally get into a
medically related media company—I first was in a magazine-publishing firm in
1993-94, and in the first decade of the 2000s, I worked often for medical-promotion
firms—you can adapt to what is needed. I know plenty of other editors in the
same arena didn’t start out in life with much education in a medically related
field. They learned as they went. I mentioned to Paul that one medical editor
I’d known had majored in music, or something like that.
As it happens, in medicine—as surely many people can gather
from their adult experience—there is specialization, among doctors as among
others. One doctor specializes in ear, nose, and throat medicine, another in
cardiology. Well, medical editors can be better in some sub-areas than others.
I always disliked, and couldn’t quite “get,” a lot of stuff in cardiology, as
simple as the field may seem. This though, when it passes under your editorial
nose frequently (as it did at my 1993-94 job), you somehow “grudgingly” learn
some stuff in the field, almost the way—if you don’t really like sports, as is
true of me—you still learn about issues and personalities in sports from
hearing “despite your preferences” the sports news beating its drums in the
media every day.
If you understand how you get “skilled” as I’ve described in
an area that seems “is only for those schooled in the area,” then you should be
able to appreciate this:
The problems that arise, if you accept the above as part of
your “education” as an editor, include: (1) dealing with mismanagement from
people who know the specialized fields even
less than you as an editor do, such as when managers at a
medical-promotions company has you try to “reference-check” a document that has
references (or, after a fashion, end notes) against the original sources—under
a crazily tight deadline; and
(2) doing editorial work on technical material you really
don’t know well, or have a hard time being interested in.
(3) Keeping up your interest is an issue with all kinds of
material (medical or not), whether it is (in the abstract) of a type you know
well or not. For instance, the sheer volume of material you’re required to
handle may mean that efforts to keep up your interest for reading can be pushed
over willy-nilly into boredom or exhaustion. Or a lack of sleep, or too-long a
day, or such could affect your ability to read.
(4) Wild mishandling of how you’re approaching material by
managers—whether or not they once did hands-on editorial work themselves, or
never did—has come up from time to time. One of the tackiest, crap-level
instances of this was when I was at North Jersey Newspapers, and I did copy
editing of press release material, which had to be “styled” to conform with
Associated Press style and otherwise made more readable. Some stuff—meaning,
“copy” sent in from (layperson) outsiders—was jammed through the system—and
initially it was run through a kind of scanner or, sometimes, hand-typed, by a
college student (Lisa A.) who “did what she was told” by higher-ups and who
seemed a bit oblivious to what it took for an editor like me to hammer the copy
into shape.
I got good at this hammering, and ended up handling some
6,000 press releases over two and a half years, most of which (amazingly) weren’t
used, even while they were stored in the computer system—the editorial system
(in terms of management), at that specific branch of NJN, was that inefficient.
But some of the amateurish copy wasn’t even written as an
article—it was hand-scrawled crap someone had sent in, which I then had to
basically write into an article of sorts, after the college student who entered
the crap into the computer had typed it however it originally appeared as
barely literate verbiage.
Another, more droll example was senior citizen clubs’
sending in their homely minutes, which I then had to hammer into shape as a
sort of article that ran on the seniors page. It got so comical that the
minutes would include a remark that the last meeting was covered in the
newspaper, and this point I would leave it when I edited the minutes I had in
hand.
##
The way (unexpected by laypeople) a professional editor reads. The
technical ways you adapt, or “make expedient adjustments,” include these: (1) In
general, proofreading or copy editing material means that you don’t read it in
the “enjoying” way you ordinarily would, as a youth enjoying a favorite book.
It means you pay attention to the material, and be ready to make marks indicating
errors, as if you were looking with a drily technical eye at artifacts. In this
way, professional editing takes the “romance” out of reading, and otherwise
“addressing,” printed material. In fact, I’ve often thought I would like to get
back to just enjoying reading the way I used to (in some ways) in the 1970s and
’80s.
(2) Also, I think I have some level of reading disability,
because I often have trouble reading books or articles that I do for personal
reasons (not professional). I attend to the wrong details, and have trouble
keeping up my concentration. This has been true of me since the 1970s. As this phenomenon
coheres with, your being skilled as an editor need not mean you are a
“typically good student as a reader”—in fact, being a bit of a freak in handling language may cohere with your
developing strong competence as an editor.
You also can (often) be in situations when you proof for certain things. This can be when the
volume of material is so huge that you can’t do otherwise. So you check for
misspellings or punctuation issues that jump out at you. Or you may be required
by a manager to check only for certain things.
One of the droll facts of life at medical promotion
companies is that a trafficker, which is a sort of work-ferrying person
(usually a young female) who typically has no editorial experience, would
routinely request on a work-direction sheet that you should check only for
“gross errors” on the item at hand. This always struck me as quaint, because if
all they meant was obvious errors and not things to quibble over endlessly
stylistically, that need and practical parameter were obvious. But on a more
abstract level, an error was an error, and as an editor it was your duty to
mark it. The vast majority of the time in these instances, that was all you
would be apt to do as a matter of usual course, especially since most times in
medical-promo work, the amount of copy is very little (and often relatively
simple), compared to that at other types of publishers.
Not just spelling (of course!). The points here on the
technical “footwork” of editing can be driven home in two ways. One is in
relation to Paul’s point in response to when I said that media firms were
finding ways to bypass using copy editors and proofreaders with the means of computerized
spell-check and such (a rough generalization I made that could be refined in a
number of ways): he said he didn’t mean
just spelling (he sounded a bit pedantic here), he meant…thinking (whatever
his fundamentalist point was).
Ah, not just spelling. Well, tell that to the managerial
types who used to run people like me ragged through too much stuff to edit, and
now who seem aided by the fact that not only a home computer (e.g., with
Microsoft Word) has spell-checking and an attempt at pointing out grammatical
lapses (with green underscoring), but also Google Drive, which is promoted for
use in schools almost as a substitute for individual computers in handling
documents, has spell-checking and such.
OF COURSE being a good writer and editor isn’t just spelling. YOU’RE MISSING THE POINT. THE
POINT IS THE BEASTLY EXPEDIENTS OF THE BUSINESS WORLD.
For example: When I look in recent months at The Star-Ledger, New Jersey’s main
newspaper, which has undergone a major editorial change since September 2014, I
am shocked at the amount of errors. Copy editing errors—even in headlines—that
in the old days would have been caught, fixed, in routine fashion. The Ledger prevented these from showing up
in the finished printed product; many other publishers would. These types of
errors would have been ironed out when I was even at the farm-team office I was
in at North Jersey Newspapers.
Today, there just is not a business embrace of the personal
copy editing function. Very simple.
One of the practically minded codas I would add to this is
that newspapers can “afford” to have more errors because an educated readership
can usually read past them. They can fill in a missing word, or correct a
misspelling when reading.
Seat-of-the-pants professional reading. Another point that can
be made, which I don’t think Paul’s comments specifically prompted, is that
when you do professional proofreading and copy editing, you are not reading in
the innocent, enjoying way of a young student. (I will qualify this in a
minute.) At times, I have edited things, doing what level of changes were
called for, without fully understanding what I was reading. I remember way back
at All American Crafts, one editor—a friendly, fairly wise woman named Sally
Klein—asked me what I thought of (some content in) a feature article of sorts
she’d had me proofread. I don’t remember what I answered, but I do remember
feeling that “I don’t really know; I wasn’t really reading it for meaning.” And
I’ve had this kind of experience a number of times over the years, without
embarrassment (in fact, sometimes I can be annoyed that people will ask me
about some fine points about what something said, when clearly, from my
standpoint, that wasn’t integral to my job).
So—you can read something simple and iron out errors, and
pretty much understand it; you can read something more technical and be able to
iron out mechanical errors and not have fully understood it; and sometimes you can
be bored shitless with some copy that
you are expected to “edit.”
It is by these work conditions we try to make money to pay
bills, without the union protections, tenure, or nice level of income of a
teacher. (Never mind pensions when we retire—here in New Jersey….)
##
The passing stupidity of the firm Science Temps. Among other
things Paul and I discussed, there was the following anecdote—and if it would
have made his eyes roll, I basically was in accord with him on this, but it
went to show how pragmatic (a word I
used for him as indicating a key criterion of the industry) the professional
editing world can be, and especially (in this case) how stupid it could
sometimes be. I said to him there was some placement agency named “Science
Temps” I had dealings with many years before (I think it was around 2001 or
2003). (I think I’d sent resumes to them, because they used to advertise in the
newspaper, as so many companies I’ve had dealings with used to do, and don’t
anymore. But I never actually worked for Science Temps.)
A woman from that firm once called me, maybe left a message
and I called back; she said there was an opening for something at a
pharmaceutical company where they wanted a technical writer, or such, with a Ph.D. The degree was a key requirement.
I voiced hesitancy over this; it seemed to me crystal-clear that if a Ph.D. was
wanted, then I didn’t qualify. But in the midst of our talk, the woman—age maybe
about 45 or 50, and who spoke in a sort of vapid singsong (you have to
understand the special “delusional” quality of placement-agency types to really
appreciate this)—said about the issue, “What do you think?”
I said I really didn’t think they were going to take me, but
(just to be simply-pragmatic about it, and maybe to brush her off) I said she
could send my resume over just to see (on which latter point I was, very
common-sensically, not hopeful). I really thought I would not be called in for
an interview or a test-run. And I never heard from this woman again. Which was
just as well.
But that kind of pragmatic, sometimes almost unethical (on a
placement agency’s part) stuff is what you often encountered in my line of
work.
As I said, you try to get into less compromising situations
as you get older, and gain experience and try to be choosier. That’s not always
what happens.
Subsections to come in Part 7:
Compositors (layout workers)
Proofreaders in the studio
Production editors who did hands-on corrections
More content-editing and writing sorts there
Mike’s learning curve
on getting there
To be continued.
