Dreyer’s English: An Utterly Correct Guide to Clarity and Style by Benjamin Dreyer

I picked up Dreyer’s English because I was intrigued by the words “Copy chief of Random House” on the cover and was further intrigued when I cracked it open and found a mention of Words into Type, a venerable editing reference. I found that the book is a pleasure to read, does an amazingly complete job of covering standard copy editing knowledge, and as a bonus, conveys a lot of insight into the copy editor’s role and job in editing fiction and creative nonfiction.

Every book on how to write has to take a certain philosophical stance on how prescriptivist to be. Dreyer takes a fairly pragmatic approach. As the copy chief of Random House, he talks to authors and he hears from readers. He respects authors’ ownership of their works, but knows that authors don’t want to get floods of letters from readers about grammar and usage matters that the author hadn’t even noticed. He doesn’t try to sweep back the tide of general usage, but he also trusts his taste and judgment.

In thirteen chapters, the book covers the gamut of copy editing knowledge, including “The Stuff in the Front”:

• Tricky grammar points
• Treatment of numbers
• Cleaning out needless words
• Which non-rules to ignore
• Punctuation

“The Stuff in the Back” includes useful notes on commonly misspelled words^* and common usage errors, as well as some miscellaneous points, including a discussion of “the habit of inauthentically attributing wisecracks, purported profundities, inspirational doggerel, and other bits of refrigerator-door wisdom to famous people.” From your lips to God’s ears, Mr. Dreyer. A useful part of the book is a set of things to watch out for in fiction, such as checking sunrise and sunset times, or anachronisms with postal codes and phone numbers to watch out for.

Reviewed from a library copy.

^*I consider myself to be a good speller, but some of these (“elegiac”) gave me qualms. I couldn’t resist doing a computer-wide search for the misspelling elegaic, but to my relief, it didn’t turn up in any old editing projects, only in a published magazine not edited by me.

Trauma-informed editing with Iva Cheung

At a recent meeting of the Editors’ Association of Canada, Iva Cheung, a researcher in knowledge translation and exchange, presented on trauma-informed editing. Here are a few notes based on her talk.

What is trauma?

There are various definitions of trauma. The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition, defines it in terms of being exposed to death, serious injury, or sexual violence, but other sources use a wider definition that acknowledges that many forms of violence, abuse, or other experiences that overwhelm a person’s ability to cope can result in trauma. I think of trauma as a psychological injury. Like bodily injuries, some psychological injuries heal on their own; others require health care intervention; many injuries have lasting consequences.

What is trauma-informed care?

Trauma-informed care is an approach within health care that recognizes the widespread incidence and impact of trauma and tries to integrate knowledge about trauma into practices to avoid re-traumatizing the patient. According to the Trauma-Informed Care Implementation Resource Center, the principles of trauma-informed care are:

• Safety: staff and patients feel physically and psychologically safe
• Trustworthiness and transparency: decisions are made with transparency
• Peer support: people with shared experiences are incorporated into the organization
• Collaboration: power differences are reduced with shared decision-making
• Empowerment: building on strengths
• Humility and responsiveness: biases and stereotypes are recognized and addressed

Trauma can have a variety of effects related to stress, not all of which are obvious. For example, lack of confidence in the ability to achieve goals or difficulty in navigating relationships. Stress is particularly likely to be caused by things that:

• Are new or unpredictable
• Threaten the ego (make a person feel their competence is questioned)
• Produce a sense of not having control

Writing for audiences who may have experienced trauma

When writing for audiences who may have experienced trauma, there are some measures you can take to reduce the risk of unintentionally harming someone. 

Clearly describe the document’s contents

The most basic way to protect people is to be clear about what is in the document. You can use a content note to let people know what is in the document. A good table of contents and clear headings also help readers avoid any sections that may be a problem for them.

Guidelines for content notes:

• Don’t be too general, like the television warning “may be disturbing to some viewers.”
• On the other hand, don’t be too specific about the content, or you can replicate the harmful content. Say, for example, that the material describes a serious injury, or discusses sexual violence, but don’t give details.
• Keep in mind that images tend to have a greater impact than text descriptions.

Topics to consider writing content notes for:

• Death
• Abuse
• Suicide
• Colonialism and genocide
• Sexual violence

If a document contains discussion of topics that are likely to be very upsetting to some readers, you can add references to resources such as crisis lines. You can also offer options, such as a text document instead of a video, or a way to return to the material later or view it in short chunks.

What about trigger warnings? A trigger is a stimulus that prompts a memory. In some cases this can lead to retraumatization. Trigger warnings warn readers of potentially triggering material, but the term is often misused and also casts a negative light on the material. The word “warning” also implies that the material is dangerous, which can cause people to anticipate stress.

Use anti-oppressive publishing practices

Your documents will be less likely to cause harm if you use anti-oppressive practices. This is too big a topic to go into here, but for a start:

• Use respectful terms that affirm people’s humanity
• Watch out for stigmatizing language
• Present authentic voices
• Make sure a variety of people are represented in the document, or acknowledge that the document doesn’t deal with all experiences
• Watch out for appropriation
• Consider having an authenticity or sensitivity reading of the document and incorporating your reader’s feedback

Working with authors who may have trauma

If you consider the stressors mentioned before (new, unpredictable, threatens ego, sense of no control), you can address these risks with the four c’s:

• Consent: Get the author’s consent for changes; don’t make hidden changes.
• Control: Ask the author how they want to handle the work; give them input on tracking changes, what software to use, how to communicate with their editor.
• Collaboration: Give the author input in decisions.
• Communication: Let the author know ahead of time what your publishing process is. Let them know what opportunities to collaborate they will have and what their choices are. Let them know how you incorporated their input. 

When to apply trauma-informed editing

Some people suggest that 75 percent of people in Canada will experience trauma in their lives, even using the restrictive DSM definition. About 9 percent will develop PTSD. That suggests that a lot of people have psychological injuries. Looking at the measures for trauma-informed publishing, you can see that they provide benefits for everyone: documents that state clearly what is in them, that show awareness about mental health resources where appropriate, and that use respectful language; a publishing process that emphasizes great communication and respectful collaboration with authors. I think it’s worth keeping these guidelines in mind at all times.

Resources

• https://www.brusheducation.ca/books/elements-of-indigenous-style
• https://consciousstyleguide.com
• https://raimeygallant.com/2020/02/18/responsiblestyleguides
• https://www.rachelfudge.com/style-guides
• https://www.rabbitwitharedpen.com/conscious-language-toolkit-for-editors

Recipes into Type: A Handbook for Cookbook Writers and Editors

Recipes into Type, by Joan Whitman and Dolores Simon (HarperCollins, 1993), is the standard text on cookbook editing. It’s got detailed advice on all of the tricky aspects of writing a recipe: choosing a good title, what to put in the headnote, what to include in the ingredients list, writing a good recipe method, what to cross-reference and what not to, and what to put in a recipe note. It also goes into detail about the recipe-specific copy editing considerations: punctuation, numbers, and capitalization. The chapters on indexing, manuscript preparation, and design are not directed so much at editors, but the indexing chapter in particular is helpful to understand why the index is done the way it is. Chapter 9, Useful Information, contains various container sizes, US–metric conversions, British and US cooking terms, cooking temperatures, recommended amounts for servings, and substitutions, and the word list has the authors’ recommend spelling and capitalization for a variety of food words. Anyone modernizing an old recipe might find items like egg size conversions or oven temperature conversions (fairly hot: 400°F, British gas mark 6) very helpful.

Contents

1. Setting Up a Recipe
2. The Language of Recipes
3. Punctuation
4. Numbers
5. Capitalization
6. Indexing
7. Preparation of the Manuscript
8. Format and Typography
9. Useful Information
10. Word List

As a copy editor, I find that numbers and capitalization are a very tricky area where authors and editors can take a variety of approaches. A cookbook combines narrative text in the book introduction and the recipe introductions with more technical and number-intensive text in the ingredients list and recipe method, and deciding which numbers to spell out where requires some thought. On the other hand, spelling out numbers in one place and using figures in another looks inconsistent. There are also decisions to be made about whether recipe titles are capitalized when cross-referenced elsewhere in the text, and how sub-recipes are capitalized. Recipes into Type describes the various styles and how to apply them. For some guidelines on the endless questions about which cheeses and wines to capitalize, Recipes into Type quotes the “Wines without Caps” instalment of On Language for some general guidelines.

The book is getting old, and shows its age in the chapters on design and preparation of the manuscript, but the information in the other chapters is still relevant, and the conventions for ingredients lists, recipe methods, and capitalization match what I currently see people using. Now, did I edit or proofread more than forty cookbooks before I read this book? Yes, I did. I was able to get by with the publisher’s house style guides, and the work done by the in-house editors always laid a solid base for my copy edit. However, if you are working for a self-publishing author, or for a publisher who does not specialize in cookbook publishing, or if you would like to dig a little more deeply into best practices for recipe writing, I think this book will be extremely useful.

Perfectionism and editing: getting unstuck

Photo by unukorno. Some rights reserved.

I recently attended an Editors Canada webinar “Taming the Inner Perfectionist” by Suzy Bills. Perfectionism is common among editors. It has its good side: motivation to do great work, and its bad side: fear of failure. Bills’s webinar outlined a wise strategy for setting realistic expectations and at the same time supporting yourself so that you can do the best work possible.

As I listened, the discussion of how perfectionism can lead to procrastination made me think about what makes me feel “stuck” on a project. I find that editing insecurity sometimes strikes at the start and finish of the project, and it can lead to inefficiency. At the start of the project, sometimes I find it difficult to prioritize all of the tasks, or I feel as if I have to decide every possible style issue before starting to edit the first page. At the end of the project, I’m tempted to re-check my work or I worry that I’ve forgotten to do something.

Getting started

My two main strategies for getting going on a new project when I’m feeling some uncertainty are building momentum and reducing the pressure. This is how I build momentum:

• Start with housekeeping tasks such as adding the client and project to my spreadsheet and time tracking software. These routine tasks are soothing, make me feel I’m making progress, and build confidence by reminding me of my past successes.
• Start a project notes document with any special instructions from the client. This is a way to break the project down into tasks and gives me confidence that I won’t forget a crucial requirement.
• Do easy tasks in the manuscript, such as removing extra spaces and paragraph breaks, setting the correct styles, and formatting the body text and headings. Again, these are easy tasks that make progress. Not only does it make sense to do them first, but they also give me a sense of familiarity with the manuscript.

To reduce the pressure, I often do the following:

• Tell myself that I’ll return to the first chapter to check my work and make sure it is consistent with the editing in the rest of the manuscript.
• Write down tasks to do later and questions to answer later on a to-do list in the project notes file. This keeps me from getting bogged down with too many decisions, and writing a note frees me to forget about it for now. I find that many decisions are easier to make once I’ve seen more of the manuscript, so putting off some style decisions seems to be more efficient in the long run.
• If I feel I’m working very slowly on a particular task or section of the manuscript, I turn off my work timer to remove the pressure to work “fast enough.” Once I finish the task, I can judge how much time I think it should have taken and log that.

Delivering the work

At the end of the project, it can be hard to let go. At this point, being systematic about making sure I’ve met all of the job requirements builds my confidence that I’m delivering good work. I use notes and to-do lists to keep things from falling through the cracks.

• I check my project notes file or the client’s original email to make sure I’ve done everything they asked for and to check for special instructions about delivery (and invoicing).
• Most importantly, I go through my to-do list in the project notes file to make sure all tasks are completed. At a minimum, my to-do list generally has reminders to check the table of contents, reread all of the track changes comments, and do a final spell check. Ticking off the items gives me confidence that the work is finished.
• Other checklists: the client may have a house checklist, especially for proofreading. I also have a standard checklist for proofreading that I go through.

Different editors will have their own strategies, but for me, these habits help get me moving on intimidating projects, manage decision fatigue while I’m working, and reduce delivery anxiety at the end. You can’t be perfect, but supporting yourself so you can do your best work will improve the quality of your work and your satisfaction in doing it.

From Contact to Contract: How Editors Get Clients to Work with Them

From Contact to Contract: How Editors Get Clients to Work with Them, edited by Karin Cather, is the first in Editors Canada’s new series on the business of editing. In this short book, nine highly experienced editors offer their advice and perspectives on how to find clients and build agreements with them. The topics covered include the following:

• Cold calling
• Networking
• Applying for jobs effectively
• Building a relationship with a prospective client, including ways to build trust
• When and how to do a sample edit
• Deciding whether to accept a client or refer them to a colleague
• Estimating a project

Contents

1. Introduction
2. Evaluating the client
3. How to respond to potential clients: Three case studies
4. How to impress a client from the first email
5. Considering the client’s needs
6. Choosing clients based on mutual interests
7. Sample edits: Are they necessary and should you charge for them?
8. From another author’s perspective
9. Closing the sale: A semi-cautionary tale
10. Not closing the sale
11. Conclusion

The book isn’t a textbook of how-to instructions for these skills, but instead focuses on strategies for making the best use of your time and showing yourself to your best advantage. I would recommend it for intermediate to advanced editors who are looking for ideas about how to sharpen up their business practices. I found a number of ideas for things I could do better.

Available as a paperback or ebook.

The Art and Science of Editing

“The Art and Science of Editing” is one of the courses in the Poynter ACES Certificate in Editing, an excellent and affordable introduction to editing. Here are some notes from when I took the course a few years ago.

Who are you editing for?

Know your readers, boss, self, publication, and writer.

What is editing?

Making things better.

• Who is the audience?
• What is the goal?
• What is the reader hearing? Can the reader hear what the writer is saying? If background information is missing, or the writer is using language that the reader can’t understand easily, the message won’t get through.

Hippocratic oath of editing

1. Don’t go looking for errors, because when you’re looking for errors, you’re not experiencing the writing in the way a reader does. Most readers are looking for information, not for errors to pounce on. Instead, pay attention to what happens when you read. Alertness and healthy skepticism are good, but suspicion is the wrong attitude.
2. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.
3. A good doctor leaves few visible scars. Try to be invisible.

Changing versus editing

A change is something you want to do. An edit allows the copy to meet the needs of the reader. An edit focuses on the reader, but a change is done for convenience, or to conform with a rule. A habit of making changes is what can give editors a bad reputation sometimes.

Ask yourself:

1. What is it that bothers me? What’s the fix that does the minimum damage?
2. Does the rule I’m applying actually fit here? For example, a reporter whose style guide mandated using “to dismiss” instead of “to fire” changed a reference to “Last hired, first fired” policy to “Last hired, first dismissed,” applying a rule inappropriately.

Did you make it better?

• You don’t have to make changes to justify your existence.
• Compare the text before and after. This is one of the reasons you should use track changes.
• Look at it fresh. Make another pass, and consider changing the font, letter size, or format you help you see the text afresh.
• Look at the effect of the change. Did it introduce an error?
• Don’t congratulate yourself—you’ll miss the next problem.

Keeping a good relationship with the writer

• Don’t be aggressive or defensive.
• Start with a compliment.
• Don’t let it get personal: talk in terms of the copy and the reader. Avoid saying “you wrote” because another editor may have introduced that wording. Avoid saying “I fixed” because that means it was broken. Say, “The story says this.”
• Always have a suggestion ready. “Could we make it say X?”
• Use language that the writer understands. Avoid technical grammatical terms.

Negotiating changes with the writer

• It’s OK to make some concessions for the sake of preserving your relationship with the author, as long as it doesn’t hurt the reader.
• Start with the easy stuff, like clear-cut errors like typos and spelling mistakes.
• Once you’ve built some confidence, move on to less obvious errors. Be prepared to let some of these go. Maybe you’re wrong about them.
• Save the most difficult issues for last.
• In a tie, the writer always wins. The writer is the one whose name and reputation are on the line. Never be the editor who makes changes behind the writer’s back.

Empathy

Try to put yourself in the writer’s place: understand what they’re trying to do, and when you make edits, do them the way the writer would.

Editor’s role

Aim to be respected, not liked or feared. The editor is the writer’s safety net or spotter. The editor stands up for the reader.

Editing for accessibility: Editors BC

At the last Editors BC monthly meeting, Iva Cheung gave a fascinating presentation about editing for accessibility. To begin with, she made an important point about how to look at this issue: instead of seeing accessibility as being about making accommodations for certain groups, she prefers to think of it as being about removing barriers for everyone.

Photo by tdlucas5000.
Some rights reserved.

The basics

Some ways to improve accessibility are fairly well known:

• Watch out for small fonts and low colour contrast. And when you provide documents on the web, make sure they still work if readers magnify the text size or change the background colour.
• Don’t rely on colour as the only way to convey important information.
• Add captions or transcripts to videos. Transcripts have the added benefit of making the video content indexable by search engines.

Storm danger levels by region. The image on the right simulates what someone with reduced red-green colour perception sees: it is difficult to distinguish between the highest and lowest danger levels.

Reducing cognitive load

Cognitive load refers to the amount of effort it takes to understand something. For some readers, small changes in cognitive load can have a big effect. In her amazing article “The Spoon Theory,” Christine Miserandino explains that people with chronic illness have to budget their energy very carefully. If a document is hard to access and understand, it may be too expensive in time and energy for some readers. You can reduce cognitive load by keeping documents short and well organized, and by using plain language. Plain language, which is too big a topic cover here, is a well-defined set of guidelines for clear writing, based on knowledge of how people process language.

Screen readers

People who are visually impaired or who have reading disabilities often use screen readers. Consider the following points to make sure a screen reader will read your text correctly:

• Use the correct symbol in your text. A minus sign looks like an en dash, but the screen reader will read them differently.
• Consider using words instead of symbols. “Approximately 5 grams” will be read correctly, while “~5 g” may not.
• Check that the reader reads the document elements in the correct order. In a PDF file with multiple columns, a screen reader may read straight across.

If your audience is likely to be using a screen reader on the document, run the document through a screen reader.

The web

HTML provides reflowable text so that users can adjust font size and colour, it uses tags to indicate the relative importance of headings, there is “alt” text to describe the images for those who can’t see them. The web has the potential to be a haven of accessibility. But only if you use it right.

• Keyword stuffing in your alt attribute is like parking in the accessible spot. You can use a “title” attribute instead (part of the global attributes supported by the img tag).
• Use meaningful alt text, but don’t repeat the caption.
• Only write alt text for images that are important to understanding the document, but don’t leave any alt attributes empty, because in that case a screen reader will read the file name. Insert an empty string (“”).
• Try to keep the text in the HTML flowing in logical order, regardless of your layout. This way a screen reader will read it in the right order.
• Indicate headings with h tags instead of using font size, colour, or weight (this is also good for your search engine optimization, which helps people find your document, improving accessibility).
• Try the Web Disability Simulator Google Chrome extension to try navigating your web page with filters like reduced colour vision or hand tremor applied.

Sensitivity

Wording that is disrespectful of people’s dignity throws up a barrier. A sensitivity reader can help you avoid unintentional gaffes. One area of sensitivity that not everyone thinks about is sanist language. People living with mental illness don’t always appreciate seeing chaos or irrationality labelled as “craziness.” Likewise, preoccupation with tidiness is not necessarily obsessive-compulsive disorder.

Where to use this

There’s value in removing barriers whenever you can. But if you are creating a document for a specific group, it’s extra important to consider the needs of that group. Nothing says “This isn’t for you” like a barrier that affects your target audience.

Chicago Manual of Style, 17th edition

I got my new copy of the Chicago Manual of Style yesterday. After working with my copy of CMOS 16 for seven years and studying with it for two certification exams, my old copy has highlighting, pencilling, and sticky tags—also a few folds and wrinkles, and a faint tea stain across the bottom. The updated book promises to provide better guidance for things like gender-neutral language and citing electronic sources. And although it’s daunting to have to re-read so much material, it’s extremely helpful that the breakdown into chapters is the same in this edition.

Resources

• From the publisher: a detailed list of what’s changed: What’s New in the 17th Edition
• American Copy Editors Society interview with Carol Fisher Saller of Chicago University Press about the new edition.

GST for freelance editors: should you use the quick method?

Most freelancers know that they have to register to collect GST if their earnings pass a certain threshold, but many people I talk to don’t know whether to opt for the quick method or the non-quick method of GST accounting.
If your business has relatively low expenses in relation to its income, the quick method will leave you with more money. (See the end of this article for a comparison of high- and low-expense businesses.) I calculate the crossover point as being at about 28 percent: if your business expenses come to less than about 28 percent of your gross income, consider using the quick method. Here is a sample scenario.

The quick method of GST accounting

If you use the quick method, you collect GST on your earnings and then pay a set percentage back to the CRA. You don’t have to keep track of how much GST you pay on your business expenses because you won’t claim those back. As the name implies, the bookkeeping is about as simple as possible, especially if all of your clients are in the same province as you.

Photo by Christa Gampp.
Some rights reserved.

If you use the non-quick method (I can’t find another name for it), you count up the GST that you collected, and you pay it all back to the CRA. Then you count up all the GST you spent over the year on your business expenses (business use of home, software, accounting and legal fees), and you claim that back. It’s not that much more complicated, but you have to track how much tax you pay on every business expense.

The quick method for freelance professionals

What you want to figure out is which remittance method will leave more money in your account. Here is a comparison of the two methods for a hypothetical freelancer. This freelancer lives in British Columbia, and all of their clients are also in British Columbia. They work from a home office and deduct business use of home as part of their expenses.

GST collected and paid for a hypothetical freelancer

Total income invoiced	$50,000
5% GST collected on income	$2,500
Total business expenses	$10,000
GST-eligible business expenses	$5,500
non-GST-eligible expenses:* monthly rent of $1,500; 25% business use of home	$4,500
Total GST paid for business expenses (5% on $4,500)	$262

*Non-GST-eligible expenses are expenses that are not taxed. This freelancer doesn’t pay GST on their residential rent.

GST remitted for our hypothetical freelancer

	Quick method	Non-quick method
GST to remit	3.6% remittance rate on $50,000: $1,800	everything collected: $2,500
GST paid on business expenses claimed against remittance	$0	$262
1% bonus available for those who use the quick method: 1% of GST-eligible income to a maximum of $300	$300	$0
Total remitted	$1,800	$2,238
Total kept	$1,000	$262

Our sample freelancer keeps $1,000 of the GST they collected. After you subtract the $262 of GST that they paid on their business expenses, they have gained $738 by using the quick method.

Other scenarios

Here are some factors that could change the above result:

• Not charging GST on all of your income. If a lot of your clients are outside Canada, you won’t collect GST on this income, which means the amount you keep by using the quick method is lower. In the above scenario, if all of our hypothetical freelancer’s income came from outside Canada, they would collect no GST and using the quick method would leave them with $0, while using the non-quick method would leave them with $262.
• Paying more GST on your expenses. This could happen if none of your business expenses are GST exempt, if a lot of your expenses are paid to a provider in another province with a higher tax rate, or if your total business expenses are simply higher. We could cook up a scenario here for a freelancer with important clients in the U.S. who subcontracts out a lot of work to a contractor in Ontario that would tip the balance to favour the non-quick method.

Appendix: comparing the methods for high-expense versus low-expense businesses

What type of business should definitely use the non-quick method? One with high expenses in relation to its gross earnings. For example, a business that buys something at wholesale prices and sells them at retail prices without too much of a margin on the transaction. Here’s a quick and dirty comparison using completely made-up numbers. Both businesses have the same net income of $50,000, but the high-expense business pays almost as much GST on its expenses as it collects on its sales, so if it used the quick method, it would lose $9,000 instead of keeping a GST credit of $2,500.

	Low-expense business	High-expense business
Gross income	$60,000	$250,000
Business expenses	$10,000	$200,000
Net income	$50,000	$50,000
5% GST collected on gross income	$3,000	$12,500
5% GST spent on expenses	$500	$10,000
Quick method: GST retained minus GST spent on expenses	$640	–$9,000
Non-quick method: GST retained (what you spent)	$500	$10,000
Non-quick method: GST remitted (what you collected minus what you spent)	$2,500	$2,500

CRA links for GST information

• Registering for a GST/HST account
• Quick method of accounting for GST/HST
• Electing to use the quick method

Some notes on copyright

These are a few summary notes that I started writing when I read Lesley Ellen Harris’s Canadian Copyright Law (see below for more information about the book). This is just a bit of basic, introductory information and doesn’t include lots of good stuff like the categories of fair dealing.

Types of intellectual property

1. Patent: devices, formulas, processes, or improvements to existing patents.
2. Trademark: word, symbol, logo, or distinctive shape used to distinguish a product.
3. Industrial design: shape, pattern, or ornamentation.
4. Copyright: protects text, pictures, art, audio recordings, film, software, etc.
5. Confidential information and trade secrets: ideas and information that should be kept confidential because of the terms of a relationship.

Copyright law in Canada

• Falls under federal jurisdiction, under the Copyright Act, enacted in 1924.
• Major amendments to the Copyright Act were made in 1988 (Bill C-60), 1997 (Bill C-32), and 2012 (Bill C-11: Copyright Modernization Act).
• This book does not discuss the “copyright pentalogy,” five supreme court rulings on copyright made on July 12, 2012. See The Copyright Pentalogy: How the Supreme Court of Canada Shook the Foundations of Canadian Copyright Law, edited by Michael Geist, for a discussion of the meaning of these five cases. Available as a p-book, e-book, or free PDF.
• How copyright works: property rights versus copyright protection. There’s a right to physical property, but also rights to intangible property. When a user buys a book, they have certain rights: to read or give away the book, but other rights are protected: to reproduce or translate the book.

Creations eligible for copyright protection

A work is protected by copyright as soon as it is created, as long as it fulfills the following criteria:

1. Original: It is a new work, not a copy.
2. Fixed: It is set down in some reasonably durable form: written down (even if it’s on a napkin), recorded, saved on a hard drive, etc.
3. Creator is a citizen or legal resident of Canada or another copyright treaty country, or the work is first published in a copyright treaty country.

There are some special rules for “Other subject-matter,” which means sound recordings, performances, and broadcasts.

International copyright law

Canada can extend copyright protection within countries that offer reciprocal protection to Canadian works. The following are international copyright treaties:

1. Berne Convention
2. Universal Copyright Convention (UCC)
3. World Trade Organization (WTO)
4. WIPO Copyright Treaty (WCT)
5. WIPO Performances and Phonographs Treaty (WPPT) (for sound recordings and performances)

How to get copyright protection

1. Protection is automatic

   Under Canadian copyright law, there are no formalities to obtaining copyright: it the protection exists as soon as the work comes into existence. You don’t have to register the work, deposit it, mark it with a special symbol, or include any particular statement. All countries that subscribe to the Berne Treaty (this includes Canada, the U.S., and the E.U.) have to allow automatic copyright when the work is created.

2. Adding a copyright symbol and statement (optional)

   • Makes it absolutely clear that the material is protected.
   • Provides the name of the copyright holder to people seeking permissions.

   Format of a copyright notice

   The copyright notice should include the © symbol, the year of first publication, and the name of the copyright owner. Optionally, you can add the years of major revisions, or use a range of years.

3. Registration and deposit (optional)

   You can register your work with the Canadian Intellectual Property Office (CIPO).
   • Optional, but may be helpful in a court case (you may be entitled to better remedies).
   • Can be used to register a grant of interest (an assignment or licensing of rights to a work), and may give the registered rights holder priority over the unregistered one.
   • Registration does not require—or allow—you to deposit a copy of the work.
   • The fee is $50 for online registration, and processing takes about five days.
   CIPO copyright database search. (Results for “Life of Pi.”)

4. “Poor man’s copyright”

   This method of proving ownership of a work seems to have entered folklore. The idea is that you put a copy of the work into an envelope and mail it to yourself. You leave the envelope sealed until you open it in court to prove that the work existed on the postmarked date. Skeptics point out that an obvious way to cheat is to mail yourself an unsealed envelope and put the work in later. Harris’s book describes poor man’s copyright as a method of providing evidence of existence and ownership, but suggests using registered mail, which presumably requires the envelope to be sealed, or mailing it directly to your lawyer.

5. Registration with the U.S. Copyright Office

   Copyright protection is also automatic in the United States. However, you can choose to register your work with the U.S. Copyright Office. One of the benefits of doing this is that they accept deposits, which can help you prove a case down the road.
   • eCO Registration System: the fee is US$35, and the processing time is about eight months, according to the site.
   • U.S. Copyright Office search. (Results for “Life of Pi.”)

6. Library and Archives Canada deposit

   Library and Archives Canada (LAC) requires copies of publications to be deposited, but this has nothing to do with copyright.

7. Other depositing services

   Professional organizations and writers’ unions may provide depositing services. Using such a service will not cause you to be registered in the Canadian copyright database, but it might help you prove ownership of a work.

International copyright law

International copyright laws are relevant when you distribute your work outside of Canada, or use works created outside the country.

International copyright treaties

There is no international copyright law, just agreements between countries. In copyright treaties, each country agrees to give citizens of other signing countries the same protection they give their own citizens. One exception is for length of the copyright term.

Berne Convention

• Canada is a member, which means that Canada’s Copyright Act has to meet the levels of protection specified in the Convention, and that Canada protects the rights of creators from countries that belong to the Berne Convention.
• The text and a list of member countries is at Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works.
• The Berne Convention specifies automatic copyright protection. Once a creator in a member country has copyright, copyright protection is automatically granted in all member countries. Berne Convention countries are not allowed to require any formalities for obtaining copyright.

Other international conventions

• Universal Copyright Convention
• Rome Convention

Material protected by copyright

Not protected:

• Ideas
• Facts

Copyright law protects the expression of ideas and facts, but not the facts themselves.

Additional resources: Canadian law

ISBN: 978-1-118-0751-8
October 2013, 368 pp.

• Canadian Copyright Law, by Lesley Ellen Harris. See this post for a review of the book.
• The Copyright Pentalogy: How the Supreme Court of Canada Shook the Foundations of Canadian Copyright Law, edited by Michael Geist.

Additional resources: U.S. law

• U.S. Copyright Office’s “Copyright Basics”
• Chicago Manual of Style, Chapter 4 (online resource requires an account; free trial available)

Editorial fingerprints

Ideally, editing is invisible. Typos are corrected, small errors of fact pointed out, plot howlers averted, and the end result is a seamless, polished work that doesn’t betray any hint of multiple minds at work. Usually when I read books that I didn’t work on, I see text that seems to have sprung fully formed out of the author’s mind, but once in a while I see, not a scar exactly, but perhaps a band-aid.

In an excellently edited, smart, well-written thriller, the protagonist releases the safety catch on his Glock. Aha! I said. The Glock doesn’t have a safety catch. But a few pages later, there’s a passing reference to the gun being “modified.” What do you think? Author’s original vision or editorial band-aid?

I laughed out loud when I came across a sentence in another book that read, “Some people say insanity is doing the same thing and expecting a different outcome.” I bet there was a query on that manuscript that said, “Actually, [Albert Einstein/Mother Teresa/Benjamin Franklin/Leonardo da Vinci] probably didn’t say this. This quote seems to be attributed to various people without any evidence. I’ve edited to read ‘some people say’ instead. OK?” Dubious quote provenances are the bane of fact checking.

And on rare occasions, a disagreement bursts right out into the open. On the copyright page of Garner on Language and Writing, the eight-line American Bar Association policy statement is supplemented by an exemplary plain language rewrite titled “How Bryan Garner wanted the statement to read.”

From Garner on Language and Writing by Bryan Garner.

Or even worse:

Photo posted by @AcademiaObscura on Twitter.

It’s not about the turtle—or the elephants either

It’s been six months since Sir Terry Pratchett’s death, and I never did finish my thoughts.

I started reading him in my late teens, as I worked my way through a friend’s book collection. It took me a little while to warm up to him, but by the time I’d read Lords and Ladies, I was hooked. There is so much more there than funny footnotes, dwarf bread, and oograh.

I’ve met other Pratchett fans here and there—fellow students, the property manager of our old apartment—and every time it’s like discovering a common friend. People have their favourite characters. I’m partial to police commander Vimes in Night Watch, Thud, and Snuff, with his passionate sense of justice. But my favourite stories are the ones about the witch Granny Weatherwax with her goats, and her bees, and her herbs, who traded any possibility of normality and belonging to pursue knowledge instead.

It happens that I just read his collection of nonfiction A Slip of the Keyboard recently. Pratchett argued patiently and reasonably that people in the U.K. should be allowed to have the choice of assisted dying, and it seems that some change has come about.

Neil Gaiman on Terry Pratchett, from his wonderful introduction to Slip of the Keyboard.

How can I protect my work before sending it for editing?

Sometimes writers ask how they can protect their intellectual property before sending it to an editor. Register the copyright? Write a contract? Here’s what I tell them.

Choose an editor you trust

The most important thing is to choose an editor you trust and feel comfortable with. Your editor is bound by professional ethics to respect your privacy and your ownership of the manuscript. Make sure the person you’re thinking of hiring is a legitimate practitioner. Do an online search for their name and contact information and make sure their information checks out. Make sure their communications with you sound reasonable. You can also discuss the work on the phone, ask for references, see if the editor’s LinkedIn connections look believable, and find out if they belong to a professional organization.

Put your expectations in writing

Although a good editor will respect your ownership rights, there’s no harm in writing a simple letter of agreement or contract that states that the editor cannot share the manuscript with any third party without your explicit permission and that you retain full rights. Editors Canada has a sample editing contract that you could add this to.

Use good computer security

As well as taking precautions to make sure you don’t lose your work to a computer crash, you should also consider computer security. If you are very concerned about security, consider encrypting your manuscript before you store it in a cloud storage service or send it via email.

Understand that you already have copyright protection

It’s important to understand that under Canadian and U.S. law,* you automatically have copyright on your manuscript as soon as your work is written down. Although you can register your work with the Copyright Board of Canada, you don’t need to do that to secure your rights. (If you do decide to register your work, it probably makes more sense to register at the time that you publish, when the manuscript is in its final form and you are releasing it into the wild.)
*In all countries that are members of the Berne Convention, copyright comes into being automatically, without the creator having to register their work.

Editors Canada Conference 2016: Jessica Oman on a simple growth plan for your business

“I’m sure I can fit that in.”
(Photo by Kaarina Dillabough. Some rights reserved.)

“Get Booked Solid” was the title of this presentation. Irresistible. I couldn’t let a conference go by without attending at least one talk about marketing my services.

Four main errors freelancers make

Jessica suggested that most freelancers who aren’t happy with the amount of work they’re finding are making four mistakes:

1. Allowing the feast or famine cycle
2. Marketing in a nontargeted way
3. Applying marketing strategies inconsistently
4. Not having a plan

Some better ideas

Offer value up front. Most people you talk to don’t need you now. To keep them from forgetting you, offer them something of value right away. Talk about the challenges they have in their work, and then offer them something to help them with that problem, even if it’s a link to a blog post. You can also give away a report or a guide, a sample edit, or a free consultation.

Follow up with your leads (a lead is someone who has expressed an interest in your service). Send them relevant information or case studies about people in their industry or find other things you can give them that will be helpful. Jessica suggests that she usually talks to people about five times before they start working together.

Convey the transformation that your service will bring to their business. Always look for ways to communicate how your service will make their lives easier. (This is relevant to price, as well. If a client is convinced that you’re going to add a lot of value to their business, they won’t balk at your rates.) Do this by sharing testimonials about what you did and how it helped your client. You can also share case histories about other companies who improved their business by hiring editors. Or you can share stories about companies who didn’t hire editors and suffered public disasters as a result (using fear to help sell your service).

Identify your ideal customer:

• Editing tasks
• Medium
• Subject matter
• Field
• Audience
• Demographic details of the customer

Find out where your ideal customers hang out, and go there. Also, introduce yourself as the editor who works for your ideal customer. Many of us are generalists who work on a variety of materials, but saying so is just not memorable. Jessica suggests that you introduce yourself as the editor you want to be for the best chance of having the work you want come to you.

Be consistent in your marketing efforts, and measure the results:

• Number of leads
• Number of customers
• Conversion rate: leads who turn into customers
• Value: how much each customer spends
• How long the relationship lasts
• Whatever else is meaningful to you

Avoid thinking and acting from a scarcity perspective where you take jobs that are not ideal because you’re afraid you won’t get anything else. Try to run your business from a perspective of abundance where you believe you can afford to give something away, and you can afford to hold out for your ideal client.

Editors Canada Conference 2016: Bill Walsh’s keynote speech

“You’re the editor,” said Bill Walsh during his keynote speech. His message was that although yes, language change happens, and yes, we’ll move with the times, we’re the editors, and our job is to choose the style option that’s appropriate for the publication and its readers. When Bill saw his first copy of The Associated Press Stylebook, he was delighted (“All that correctness!”). Same when he first read Strunk and White (“Omit needless words!”), but as time passed, he took a more nuanced view. What if omitting needless words makes the text really hard to read?

A descriptivist editor seems like a contradition in terms: What are they going to do? look at the copy and say, “Yep, that’s what the author wrote”? But he points out that there’s a difference between throwing eggs at your neighbour’s house because they use “impact” as a verb, and getting paid by your neighbour to edit their writing and leaving “impact” in place. You’re the editor. But extreme prescriptivism doesn’t make sense either. If you’re going to try to freeze language at a certain stage, which decade are you going to choose as the one time when English was correct? Bill suggests that style guides should lag a little behind the general trend: seeing e-mail with the hyphen today may look a little old-fashioned, but it doesn’t disturb a reader as much as email did in the late nineties.

Although obviously language is changing, Bill is skeptical about the supposed trend toward lowercasing and the trend to closing hyphenated compounds. In fact, he says, there seems to be a law of conservation of hyphens. The same people who close generally hyphenated compounds lever apart words that have been closed together for a hundred years.

The Don’t Just Read Dudes Project

I read a lot. It’s what I do when I’m not doing anything else. And since 2001, I’ve been keeping a list of what I’ve been reading. Once in a while, I scan through this list, and it’s noticeable that a lot of the authors on my list have . . . Y chromosomes. It’s also noticeable that there are a lot of fantastic books by women on the list. I loved The Martian and of course I ripped through Seveneves, but now I’m ready to spend some time with a different focus. Lois McMaster Bujold, Dorothy Sayers, Octavia Butler, Ann Leckie, Ursula Le Guin, Maggie Stiefvater, and Katherine Addison are all writers I’ve read recently who write (or wrote) masterful, insightful, gripping books that make me want to read more like them.

So I decided in January that I’m going out of my way to read more great books by women. I’m going to say twenty books in the first half of 2016. I’m counting rereads, but only if it’s been at least fifteen years since the first read. I’m also not sticking to this diet exclusively, because I wanted to finish Accidents in North American Mountaineering, and Fifty Degrees Below had showed up in the interlibrary loan queue (but I was a little frustrated with Fifty: as Frank burbles on about how logical it is to sleep in the park and hang out with homeless guys every night, I can’t stop noticing how unworkable that solution would be for most people with breasts). This isn’t going to be any effort to survey the great classics of female authors, by the way; I’m just going to read whatever seems fun.

Read so far

1. What Makes This Book So Great by Jo Walton
2. Ramona the Pest by Beverly Cleary
3. Pride and Prejudice (reread) by Jane Austen
4. The Left Hand of Darkness (reread) by Ursula Le Guin
5. Ellen in Pieces by Caroline Adderson
6. Over Sea, under Stone (again) by Susan Cooper. Book one of the Dark Is Rising series, which I read through except for The Dark Is Rising itself, which I reread two years ago.
7. Greenwitch (again) by Susan Cooper
8. The Grey King (again) by Susan Cooper
9. Silver on the Tree by Susan Cooper. I think this was the first time. The other books are very good, but this one I didn’t like as much. Too much magic, I think.
10. Tooth and Claw by Jo Walton
11. Gentleman Jole and the Red Queen by Lois McMaster Bujold
12. Climbing Free: My Life in the Vertical World by Lynn Hill and Greg Child. I’m very interested in motivation, and check out this one: “For me, the ascent represented a kind of performance art to demonstrate the values I believed in.”
13. Ancillary Mercy by Ann Leckie
14. Miss Manners’ Guide to Excruciatingly Correct Behavior by Judith Martin
15. Merchanter’s Luck by C. J. Cherryh
16. Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail by Cheryl Strayed
17. The Just City by Jo Walton
18. The Woefield Poultry Collective by Susan Juby
19. Republic of Dirt by Susan Juby
20. The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller

Update, June 19

Earlier this month, I finished The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller. It makes twenty books, so I’m calling the project finished for now. Lots of pleasant surprises in that book list. There was a bit of a digression when I blew off a Pulitzer-prize-winning Anne Tyler book to read a long piece of Harry Potter fan fiction. After the Harry Potter fan fic I had to reread the first two Harry Potters for comparison; then after The Song of Achilles, I had to dip into the Iliad for comparison.

What Makes This Book So Great?

I’ve just devoured a book I’ve been waiting to get my hands on for a while: Jo Walton’s What Makes This Book So Great: Re-Reading the Classics of Science Fiction and Fantasy. There are two reasons this book is so great: Jo Walton likes the kinds of books I like, which means I get to read essays about some of my favourites. And she also enjoys books in the same way I do: she reads a lot, she reads books she likes, and she re-reads.

I read in cafes and tea houses. I don’t think of this as going there especially to read, any more than I think of going there to breathe. I will be reading and breathing while I am there drinking tea, that goes without saying.

I don’t know a lot of people who re-read, but to me it’s central to getting to know and enjoying a book. There’s an interesting discussion in this book about the reasons for re-reading—how sometimes you want something you know you like, and how if you read a lot there’s not an infinite supply of books that you really like. Re-readers will be enlightened by the essay on the Suck Fairy, a phenomenon known to re-readers everywhere. (The Suck Fairy sprinkles suck on your favourite books, so that when you re-read them, you find racism, sexism, and authorial tics that can’t possibly have been there when you were younger.) There are tantalizing hints throughout this book of a household that collects books because they might not be in print, or they may not be in the library. A family and a circle of friends who collect books, share them, and talk about how great they are. I would love to see those bookshelves.

I used to only read in-print paperbacks and current SF magazines in the bath, but since I moved here where I have a huge old bath and very hot summers, I have given in and now even read hardbacks, as long as they belong to me.

I read with great pleasure the series of essays on the Vorkosigan Saga, but I’ve also learned that my reading has some large gaps in it, so I’ll be reading some C. J. Cherryh and Steven Brust, and then re-reading the parts of What Makes This Book So Great that discuss them. In fact, I’ve got a whole list of authors to check out, so that’s a gift that keeps on giving. These essays appear online at Tor.com. The above quotes are from “Gulp or Sip: How Do You Read?”

Project management at Beyond the Red Pencil: Editing in the 21st Century

I really admire how good project managers keep their eye on the goal. If someone doesn’t do their job or a problem shows up, it’s easy to get upset and hung up on the problem; project managers stay calm and focus on what has to be done to make the project succeed. To find out more about how project managers do what they do, I went to the panel discussion on project management at the Beyond the Red Pencil: Editing in the 21st Century conference.

How do people get into project management?

It seems there’s a certain personality type for people who become project managers, so if you organized your toys when you were five, you may have what it takes. One panellist said he became a project manager out of self-defence. When he was an editor, he would go around the office and hurry up the writers so that he could go home on time. If you want to move from another type of work into project management, pay attention to the project management tasks you already do and claim those as expertise.

Some project management skills and strategies

• Maintain a real respect for everyone in the project. The project manager needs to know how long tasks take and what’s involved, and most of all, respect the work.
• Be very understanding of other people’s challenges.
• Take note of the things that repetitively take your time, and take the time to automate or streamline those tasks.
• Prioritize the trade-offs between cost, timeline, and quality.
• Ignore problems until they go away. No, really. Have a contingency plan, but remember that some problems will be cancelled out by other problems.
• See problems before they happen. Consider what can go wrong and what you can do about it.

Project managers and freelancers

Working with freelancers is a special challenge for project managers because freelancers are only available for certain blocks of time. If your schedule changes, it often means having to find a different freelancer to do the work.

To stand out as a freelancer, don’t just do the work on time. Check in before the project starts to let the project manager know you’re on track and find out whether anything has changed. If you finish early, deliver early! If you’re going to be late, tell the project manager as soon as possible. Provide a realistic later delivery date, or provide options for having someone else take over the work. And a little secret: yes, a Friday afternoon delivery is probably functionally the same as a Monday morning delivery. Ask for the weekend if you need it.

The freelance project manager

• Fees: you may charge an hourly rate or make the project management a percentage of the project fee.
• You can present a menu of services, but can get too detailed and complicated. Keep the description of your services fairly simple.
• Whether you charge an hourly rate or not, always track your time so that you learn how long things take.

Project management tools

Most of the panellists used fairly simple software support, generally something based on a spreadsheet that could be printed on a big sheet of paper. One panellist had experience with a complex time tracking system, but found that it was too time-consuming to use; people either didn’t use it or entered fake information to match what their supervisors wanted to see.

Erasable pens for proofreading

I’ve started proofreading with Pilot Frixion erasable pens recently. Unlike the messy erasable pens of the eighties, these ones work like a dream, without spreading eraser rubbings or wearing out the paper. These pens work with heat: as you rub the plastic knob on the back of the pen over the ink, it produces heat that makes the ink transparent.

I particularly like the red pen for proofreading on paper. I prefer pen over pencil for proofreading because it shows up better and is clear and sharp for making small marks. The problem has always been trying to keep things tidy when I can’t erase my marks. I was very fond of the Bic Wite-Out correction tape for covering up mistakes, but erasing them is far better.

So far I’ve tried the blue 0.7 mm Frixion Ball and the red 0.5 mm Frixion Point, and I like them both. The colour of the ink is nice, and they use a gel ink that isn’t greasy and doesn’t run or smudge. I don’t know whether anyone has had a problem with the ink fading under hot conditions (like a car dashboard in the sun), or whether the erased marks can be made to show again, but I haven’t noticed any problems with durability.

Edit: So it turns out that if you leave a freshly microwaved cup of tea sitting on your notebook, you can in fact erase your ink wholesale. This is a little disconcerting—what if someone puts my proofed manuscript down on a radiator and bleaches out two hundred pages’ worth of edits? The thought gives me the willies. A quick experiment with the freezer suggests that recently erased marks become visible again when exposed to cold, which is pretty worrying too: what if a cold trip on a FedEx airplane makes all of my erased marks visible again?

“When to use bad English” with James Harbeck (Editors Canada Conference 2015)

James Harbeck gave a great talk on when to use “bad” English. Bad English in this case means nonstandard English: ungrammatical constructions, jargon, slang, and vulgarity. And the first lesson for editors is that you should use bad English when it’s not bad. Some of the rules taught in the past never had much basis in logic, grammar, or common usage, and are now widely dismissed as superstitions. So go ahead: split infinitives and end your sentences with prepositions.

James has posted a writeup of his talk on his blog Sesquiotica.