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. Images from https://yr.no.

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.

Resources

• Some best practices for writing alt text.
• Google Chrome Web Disability Simulator.
• Conscious Style Guide: a style guide and newsletter about respectful language.

Ethics for Editors Seminar

Photo by Runar Eilertsen. Some rights reserved.

Understand your role.

Keep your promises.

These were the guiding principles behind our discussions during an Editors’ Association of Canada seminar taught by Mary Schendlinger of Geist magazine.

Why does a copy editor need to understand ethical issues?

Editors are the front line of the publishing industry: after authors, editors work most closely with manuscripts, and often, that makes them the publishing professionals who flag potential libel, copyright infringement, plagiarism, invasion of privacy, and biased language. If you work with self-publishing authors, you might be the only publishing expert the author comes in contact with who can warn them about these issues.

Responsibilities to many stakeholders

You may think of publishing ethics in terms of dealing with your employers or clients, but there is a much wider range of stakeholders to consider: authors; readers; your colleagues and the larger community of writers and artists; other publishing professionals, such as printers, designers, booksellers, libraries, advertisers, and investors; and the environment.

• The author’s hard work and creativity should be respected. Copyright law gives them the right to be credited and compensated, and for their work to be published without distortion.
• The reader deserves a good product.
• You can support your colleagues and the publishing community by participating in industry events and supporting professional associations. Treat your clients and staff well. Be honest and fair with your professional recommendations.
• Consider the environmental footprint of your publications and your work methods. Even Internet use has an energy cost.

Some questions and common problems

Photo by gego2605. Some rights reserved.

Here are a few questions that came up together with answers that were offered.

When you’re a freelance editor, is it OK to turn away a manuscript because you don’t agree with the opinions expressed in it or you just don’t feel like working on it? Yes. It’s OK to choose projects that you’ll enjoy working on, and the editing process works best when the editor is enthusiastic about the project.

Conversely, is it OK to accept a project you’re not enthusiastic about? Yes. You can do an excellent, professional job editing a manuscript even if you’re not personally passionate about wing-nut-manufacturing specifications, the life cycle of the hookworm, or cooking with kale.

What should you do when you find plagiarism in a manuscript? If you find racist or sexist statements? Plagiarism can happen by accident, and biased language might be completely invisible to the author. Treat the problem as a problem with the writing, not a problem with the author, and address it in terms of how it could distract the reader from the book’s message.

What if you’re working on a manuscript and you find errors that should have been fixed at an earlier stage in the editing? Be careful about complaining to your employer that the earlier editor didn’t do their job. It may be that what looks like an error was kept at the insistence of the author.

Further reading

• See also my introduction to Canadian libel law.
• Various style guides have sections on legal issues: Editing Canadian English, 2nd Ed., Chapter 11, “Editors and the Law,” Chicago Manual of Style, 17th Ed., Chapter 4 “Rights, Permissions, and Copyright Administration,” Associated Press Stylebook, “Briefing on Media Law,” and Canadian Press Stylebook, various sections including “Legal.”
• Canadian Copyright Law by Lesley Ellen Harris has a newly updated edition.

Advanced Proofreading workshop September 22

I can only imagine how the proofreader felt. Photo by Jeremy Keith (adactio) at Flickr. Some rights reserved.

The Editors’ Association of Canada, BC branch is offering a workshop on advanced proofreading taught by Ruth Wilson. The workshop will be on Saturday, September 22 from 9 to 4 at SFU Harbour Centre. Register by September 7 for early bird pricing (registration closes on September 14).

Red Pencil in the Woods highlights

Last week I was at Red Pencil in the Woods in Seattle (Kenmore), put on by the Northwest Independent Editors Guild. It was a great event: the cost was very reasonable, the Bastyr University campus was beautiful, and the program was well choosen and presented. I will definitely look out for the next one.

Conference highlights

Carol Saller: “Finding Our Way: Writing and Editing in the New Publishing Landscape”

This was the keynote speech by Carol Saller, the Subversive Copy Editor and senior manuscript editor at the University of Chicago Press. She referred to a report from the Association of American Publishers using BookStats that seemed to show that revenues for print overall were increasing. She also went through an overview of the different kinds of publishing available:

• Conventional: publisher pays production costs, writer gets percentage of the net revenue. A large number of copies of the book are printed together.
• Print on demand (POD): a printing technique that makes it practical to print small batches of books.
• Self-publishing: the author handles the whole production process. See CreateSpace, which provides a collection of online tools, both free and paid, to set up a book.
• Subsidy publishing: the author and publisher split the cost of production and the author gets a higher percentage of the royalties than in a conventional publishing system.

E-book panel

A panel on e-books that discussed some of the advantages of e-books (authors can continue to sell books that would otherwise not be kept in print) and some of the technical challenges of the formats. Not all e-book publishers eat their own dog food.

How to write an effective book proposal by Jennifer Worick and Kerry Colburn

See how to write an effective book proposal for a summary of this presentation.

Carol Saller on subversive copy editing

The last session of the day was Carol Saller again, talking about her philosophy for harmonious copy editing: carefulness, transparency, flexibility.

• Carefulness: Before you change something, make sure that it should be changed. An example of lack of carefulness would be meticulously changing every single instance of a misspelling that turns out to be a special term commonly used in the field. To make sure you do no harm, use Google to search for terms that look odd, and if you see an error repeated consistently, query it.
• Transparency: Show your changes. Explain to the author ahead of time what changes they can expect, and if you’re using a word processor, track your changes. Explaining your changes, showing them, and making it easy to roll them back builds trust with the author.
• Flexibility: This is the subversive part. Some styles are really pretty arbitrary (for instance, whether you put a comma between the author and date in a citation). If an author wants to do something that is against the house style but isn’t actually going to hurt readability, maybe it’s OK.

Other notes about the conference

• Kyra Freestar’s conference notes at The Editor’s POV. Includes some follow-up and notes on the keynote speech about the future of publishing and the panel on e-books.

The art of the sentence

During the Memory Festival that took place last week at the Roundhouse in Yaletown, I attended a workshop taught by Stephen Osborne, columnist and publisher of Geist Magazine, on “The Art of the Sentence,” because I thought if I could get better at creating and understanding this essential building block it would make me a better writer and editor.

We discussed a number of common sentence faults, which was certainly useful, but the most interesting ideas in the workshop, for me, were:

1. Long sentences—really long sentences—can be good. For example:
   

   “When I first saw New York I was twenty, and it was summertime, and I got off a DC-7 at the old Idlewild temporary terminal in a new dress which had seemed very smart in Sacramento but seemed less smart already, even in the old Idlewild temporary terminal, and the warm air smelled of mildew and some instinct, programmed by all the movies I had ever seen and all the songs I had ever heard sung and all the stories I had ever read about New York, informed me that it would never be quite the same again.” —Joan Didion, Goodbye to All That

   We were all taught in elementary school that “a sentence is a complete thought,” and after many years, apparently that’s a lesson worth revisiting. The sentence should keep going until you’ve completed the thought.
2. The 5-W sentence as the foundation of narrative. The “5-W” sentence contains who, what, when, where, and why. He recommended that you use one of these sentences to begin the story and then whenever the story makes a turn, or when you’re getting stuck and don’t know where to go next. The Geist writer’s toolbox explains that they reject a lot of stories because they contain too much description and not enough story, and I think the 5-W sentence is a way to force you to write narrative instead of description.
3. He also emphasized writing to satisfy your ear, and that you should read your work aloud to test it.

For more on these and other writing techniques, see the excellent Writer’s Toolbox put out by Geist magazine.