[For my European Union readers: Here is further comment related to
the Blogger change whereby your region is notified of its rights concerning
“cookies” placed during Internet traffic. See this earlier entry about this on
this blog, in the note up top.
This blog is not meant to be a directly effective commercial enterprise, and I
do not intentionally allow the ability to put cookies on your computer or other
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regard, which is noted in its own banner, complete with links, at the top of
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further. Two of the main online entities I do this with are Wikipedia (provided
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would ordinarily control. If you have
concerns about this cookie-placing matter, I would advise (1) not going to those linked-to sites (some
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contacting me with your concerns, at the e-mail address grludwig@warwick.net or tomage35@gmail.com. Thank you for
your understanding, and I don’t anticipate commenting on this issue further.]
* See End note.
[Edits 11/23/16. Edit 12/2/16.]
Part 1 of my follow-up to my
2015 series on Prentice Hall is on my other blog, here. The bulk of the story is there (and details
there help this entry make more
sense). I don’t want to fully cover my experience with Prentice Hall Higher Ed,
as I worked for it in 2001 and 2002, for reasons hinted at in Part 1, but I decided
to include a few nuggets on my other blog.
For this blog, adding notes here
is an excuse to include the disclaimer above for European Union readers, which
I really owe them.
What else say about the PH
Higher Ed experience? I remarked in a blog entry within the past few weeks (in
my CPG series, actually) of someone being skeptical of my doing editorial work
for books by professors. This was a condescending and wrongheaded reaction,
though the person generally (I knew him for years) wasn’t ill-intentioned to me
(among other things, he was of an older generation than I). The actual editing
I did of the supplement books was on the light side, and I used judgment that
I, of course, had well developed in editing from 1990 through 2001, including
on medically related material.
A few tidbits: There was a
philosophy professor who wrote a logic textbook’s associated workbook. For
these workbooks, often the content could be about the same from year to year,
with sometimes minor updates; the logic workbook, I recall, was so unchanged
that the material for it (essentially what is called a “mechanical”) that we
handled looked old and shopworn—basically, for most or all supplement books,
pages of the editorial content were stuff printed out by the professors, as if
with MS Word, and we at PH added title pages and copyright pages with our own
PageMaker or Quark machinery; and the whole set of pages was sent to be printed
via photo-offset means from the professors’ pages used as mechanicals (this is
techno-speak meaning, roughly, that the books were printed as if by a glorified
photocopying means, from the printouts as if you could do them at Staples or
Kinko’s).
Someday maybe I can show a pdf
of part of one of these books, to show you what I mean. I have several of these
PH supplements at home.
Anyway, I remember, Ginny
Livsey, my superior, called the philosophy professor a tough “son of a B,” meaning
he brooked no shit. I thought at the time, this was just as well; though PH
Higher Ed was generally good to work for, with the ways the supplement books
could be handled so much like afterthoughts, if a professor stood his or her
ground with strong will-power, with an eye to quality of the books, I would
have said, “All power to him or her.” But I had the feeling from Ginny that
this particular prof was a bit of a bastard (because he was rather too
demanding). I don’t know all the details of why, to know who was right or not.
Another professor, for a fine
arts supplement (about introductory drawing), left a bit to be desired. She had
written the supplement, and I had proofread it (I didn’t do this for all
supplements; other proofreaders did some), and I had made notes to correct some
things, such as what is called (grammar-wise) a “false parallel.” This is
actually a pretty common writing error, and is usually easy to fix.
One example you may hear a lot
on TV is with Big Pharma ads where you hear “Don’t use X if you’re nursing,
pregnant, or plan to become pregnant.” What is the problem with this? It isn’t
major, but there is a switch of the verb form from the first two predicate
parts—“…nursing” and “…pregnant”—to the third, “plan to become pregnant.” So
here, omitting a verb for “pregnant” is actually a mistake, because it is
assumed the verb is “are,” but the only way you would omit the verb for that
predicate part is if the same verb applies to all three modifying words/phrases: “are nursing,” “are pregnant,” and
“are planning to become pregnant,” if that last was the wording in the sentence.
How to fix? To this: “Don’t use
X if you’re nursing, are pregnant, or plan to become pregnant.” Or to: “Don’t
use X if you’re nursing, pregnant, or planning to become pregnant.” A simple
thing. And this is what copy editors are supposed to be on the lookout for, and
usually can fix without incident, if allowed to do their jobs without distrust
about what they’re doing. But for people who think they are perfect writers and
are not, a big kerfuffle can ensue
when it need not.
In the case of this art prof—art
teachers often aren’t great writers anyway, I’ve found—the false parallel she
did (I can’t fully remember the sentence, but I know the form of the error [update 12/2/16: See the top of the entry on my other blog with this date, to see an example of the type of error]) could
be fixed by including an “and” and an extra comma in her sentence, which
eliminated the problem. But she made a veritable stink as if this wasn’t necessary
at all, and seemed to hint I was less than competent.
I discussed this issue with a
higher-level, staff editor at PH, and the editor agreed with me. He or she said
this prof would be dropped as supplement author for the next year (the one
grammatical issue I’ve discussed wasn’t the only problem the art prof posed).
I was glad to have helped in
that regard. See, even us lowly copy editors—in concert with staff editors—can
get “professor authors” booted from a fold like PH’s; and as I recall, this
particular prof was one at a community college; she was not an especially
prestigious prof. (If she got similar work with another publisher, fine for her.
Chancy comings and goings are a hallmark of this industry, and teachers who
staunchly think otherwise need, shall we say, firm correction.)
##
End note.
“Leftovers” is a category (of which this is the fourth installment, with the
previous three on my other blog), similar to my old one (on this blog) of “Pentimento pause,” which
covers returning to previous entries for follow-up, whether the points are
important or less so.
