The reader's duty

[GOLLUM]

Originally Posted by Teresa Edgerton

Speaking only as a reader, I sometimes want to kick back and relax, too. But for me, shoddy writing happens to detract from that -- and good writing impedes it not at all. So why shouldn't I expect and ask for a certain standard of craft even in things I read solely for fun and relaxation?

Well put Mrs. E, couldn't agree more...

[littlemissattitude]

Originally Posted by j. d. worthington

Well, LMA, I can't speak for mainstream publishers on this, but I worked as a typesetter for about 11 years for a firm that did typesetting for various university presses, and I've got to come the writers' defense on this one; I saw more perfectly reasonably constructed, sensible, logical sentences so screwed up with blue pencil that you simply would not believe.... I mean, there were times I literally had to reread what I was typing in a number of times just to make sure I wasn't making mistakes, because what the writer had put made perfect sense, and what the editor had changed it to made it complete drool and dribble. If I were the writer, I think I'd be coming after that particular editor with a very sharp object with intent to kill, not maim. Remember what Harlan has in "The Whimper of Whipped Dogs" about these young copy editors fresh out of college who think they're out to save the literary world, when they really don't know their ass from a hole in the ground? Well, it's all true....

See, j. d. I said I might not know what I was talking about.

I wouldn't blame a writer if they did set out to deal with a copy editor who mangled their work. After all, it is the writer's name on the book, and who gets blamed for the typos, grammatical mistakes, and everything else when the reader gets frustrated.

However, I thought that writers usually get galleys of their books to read before they go to press? Is that not done anymore?

[j. d. worthington]

Originally Posted by littlemissattitude

However, I thought that writers usually get galleys of their books to read before they go to press? Is that not done anymore?

So far as I know, yes. When I was working in this field, that's what we did tons of: galleys, corrections to galleys, corrections to the corrections, corrections to the corrections to the corrections, and so on. Sometimes it'd go through 20 or more sets of galleys before it'd be done, and usually it was correcting what some nitwit copyeditor at a university publishers had done to a writers' manuscript. Not always, by any means. But I'd say a good 75-80% of the time. (Heck, I wanted to strangle these babes in their cribs!) And, unfortunately, even good writers are not always the best proofreaders, especially of their own work. And especially after about the 10th set of galleys, their eyes, I suspect, start to blur over things, so that they see what they want or expect to see, not what's there. (Remember Asimov's "Galley Slave"?) So, while it may be partially the writers' fault for not catching it in the galleys, I can easily understand why this isn't always done .. especially when the bloody book was just fine until some fresh-faced youngster with delusions of grandeur got hold of it with their nice, shiny new blue pencil!

[littlemissattitude]

That brings back memories of when I was writing for a community college newspaper. We'd send articles off to get them typeset and then get the copy back to be pasted up the old-fashioned way - x-acto knives and light tables and rolls of borders. That was fun. But besides writing, my other job was to be copy editor, so I'd have to read everything and send the corrections to be typeset so that we could make the corrections. We only did an eight-page tabloid every other week - budget constraints and a lack of staff wouldn't let us do a weekly, but that ended up being a lot of copy editing in the couple of days that was allotted to doing that.

Couldn't ever get anyone to do the copy editing, so I ended up being copy editor all four semesters I was on the paper, even the semester that I was also managing editor.

[j. d. worthington]

Oh, yes, newspapers can be so much fun. Back in the early Devonian Age, when I got my first job as a hubby, I worked for a paper and dealt with such things. The old punch-type sort of machines, with the photoprinters that got overheated in summer, so we'd have to have these 6-foot fans blowing on them constantly. And the ex-acto knives, and the waxing machine, and the thin border tape, and having to paste in one tiny two-letter word for corrections, and hope it didn't fall off between the compositing room and being photographed for the plates..... Oh, yes, I remember. Got so loony sometimes during the summer that a co-worker of mine (very bright lady -- spoke 8 languages, played 10 instruments, had played with both the London and Berlin Philharmonic, and during the summers would work at this little dinky newspaper) would get bored and pull out the single-edged razors used for such fine work, peel off the safety paper, and throw them into the fans. We ended up with the darned things flying at every angle at all speeds, and even had an exacto go through at one point, zooming chunk! into the wall. Took considerable pulling to get the darned thing out.

Ah, memories, memories....

[Brys]

For once, I'm entirely in agreement with Teresa.
This point about reading for fun - as far as I'm aware, almost everyone reads for fun. Yes, there are even people who read Finnegan's Wake for fun. I don't see why it's assumed that reading something more challenging is necessarily less fun for the reader - for someone like me, if it's well written I can be immersed far better in the story and can enjoy it far more than if it's badly written - eg I found it very difficult to enjoy Ian Irvine's Geomancer because of the terrible writing. The ideas, story, characters etc weren't too bad, but the prose was just so awful I couldn't concentrate on them at all. But something like Mieville's The Scar to me can be pure entertainment. I understand that sometimes you want to sit back and relax and read something a bit simpler, but I don't think that means when you read something harder you are by necessity not enjoying it.

I reckon I'd also be annoyed with editors who didn't make any sensible changes as well - it would be bad if they were too zealous and change the tone of the writing, but equally bad if they left in glaring examples of terrible writingm and it seems to me that the latter is more common in fantasy (amongst the more successful authors, at least).

[j. d. worthington]

Originally Posted by Brys

I reckon I'd also be annoyed with editors who didn't make any sensible changes as well - it would be bad if they were too zealous and change the tone of the writing, but equally bad if they left in glaring examples of terrible writingm and it seems to me that the latter is more common in fantasy (amongst the more successful authors, at least).

Brys, you really shouldn't do that to someone when they're having their first cup of coffee in the morning. I nearly choked to death! Too, too true.

(Or should that be ?)

[Teresa Edgerton]

I've been told that some writers who are very popular don't take kindly to editing after a while. I suppose their editors eventually get tired of the arguments, and give up on line-editing.

[Brown Rat]

J.D. and Littlemissattitude, I spent a couple of years copy editing for the University of California Press (not fresh out of graduate school, by any means; this was about ten years later, after I'd been teaching for a while).

My mandate was to make what they said clear without altering the author's style, so I was always extremely careful to query every change (except for correcting a typo, spelling, or grammatical error) and explain why I was suggesting that change. I red-lined the electronic copy of the original manuscript, inserting queries as footnotes, and when the author received the red-lined copy back, it was entirely up to him or her to accept or reject any changes by blue-lining the electronic file. After accepting or rejecting, the author returned the file to me, and I did clean-up, following the author's wishes and querying him or her once more if any queries had been skipped.

In other words, the author made all the final decisions about how the manuscript read. And each and every author I worked with thanked me--some profusely. Most included my name in the acknowledgments.

I will admit that one or two authors said they'd had a hard time working with a copy editor on another book. But I just want to stick up for copy editors in general here.

I suspect that the process of editing at an academic press is different than the process at a house that publishes fiction--just as the authors are different. Being an acknowledged expert in a field of study doesn't always mean that one writes effectively; some academics focus so much on the content of what they are saying that they have little energy left to communicate that content clearly to their readers. These authors are, first and foremost, academics, and are judged as such. In contrast, a writer of fiction would (I presume) be first and foremost a writer.

(J.D., the first manuscript I copy edited was marked in red pencil and eventually sent to a typesetter. That was back in 1994. Shortly thereafter, the press updated to the electronic method.)

[j. d. worthington]

Originally Posted by Brown Rat

(J.D., the first manuscript I copy edited was marked in red pencil and eventually sent to a typesetter. That was back in 1994. Shortly thereafter, the press updated to the electronic method.)

That would place it just about a year after I left the field, which was in early January, 1993. And I wasn't by any means condemning all copy editors at university presses. But in my 11 years of working there I saw an awful lot of truly ridiculous changes that often made me wonder whether this particular editor had even graduated from 5th grade. I kid you not. Some of these changes truly did make pure gobbledygook out of what a competent, if not brilliant, writer had done. If things have changed for the better, then Huzzah! I say....

[Nesacat]

Aye Teresa has it spot on. Whether a book is being read for fun and relaxation or not, shoddy writing & editing is a terrible and detracts from whatever pleasure may be gained. I recently read Melvyn Bragg's The Adventure of English and the whole book was peppered with mistakes. And a good book it was too. I kept wanting to take out my red pencil and make corrections as I went along. And to top it all the book was about the English Language.

Having said that it is also pretty interesting to follow the evolution of a book through several reprints, especially if the first edition was an old one and hardly edited at all. You can see the way the whole attitide of the industry has changed towards how the language is used as the books keep being reprinted.

[Brown Rat]

J.D., I believe you. I just felt . Copy editing isn't easy.

And it gets even harder when the project editor tells you to do extensive language editing (i.e., "rewrite entire paragraphs and sections") for an author whose native language isn't English. Or when a manuscript that was originally published in another language has been badly translated by a third party, and the editor whose name is going to be on the front cover beneath the deceased author's really really really dislikes the translation and expects you to make the book sound wonderful and somehow match the original style, yet you've never read the original and couldn't if you wanted to because you have even less knowledge of the original language than the translator.

[j. d. worthington]

Originally Posted by Brown Rat

J.D., I believe you. I just felt . Copy editing isn't easy.

Indeed. I never did that on books, per se, but I did plenty for newspapers. And some of those reporters are more than a bit temperamental about messing with their prose, even when it sounds like Lewis Carroll with Tourette's Syndrome.

And Nesa: Have you ever heard or seen Ray Bradbury's comments elicited when they started doing the masterworks edition of his books? It was the first time he'd read several of them since they were first published, and enough editing and typesetting changes had surfaced, to where his reaction was "I didn't write this!!!"

Look at how the use of punctuation has changed so drastically since the latter part of the 18th century -- especially use of the comma. It's in part because we "sight read" now more than learn through hearing things read, so a lot of attention to the rhythms and cadences of good writing are being lost. Try reading any number of popular writers out loud, and listen to how clunky so many of them sound. Then try as many of the older writers, and hear the flow and elegance and sheer joy of language used beautifully. It makes a difference. This is Pope's "Nature to advantage dress'd", I think.

[littlemissattitude]

Originally Posted by j. d. worthington

...and having to paste in one tiny two-letter word for corrections, and hope it didn't fall off between the compositing room and being photographed for the plates.....

Actually, that happened a couple of times, since the thing didn't just have to be taken from one room to another, but had to be driven across town to the newspaper office that did our printing for us. And a time or two more the correction didn't fall off, but did slip a bit, to interesting effect.

[j. d. worthington]

Originally Posted by littlemissattitude

Actually, that happened a couple of times, since the thing didn't just have to be taken from one room to another, but had to be driven across town to the newspaper office that did our printing for us. And a time or two more the correction didn't fall off, but did slip a bit, to interesting effect.

Yes, I know what you mean. With newspapers, typos and corrections can lead to some interesting ... "bloopers", for lack of a better term. Occasionally ones that leave quite a few faces a nice bright cherry red....