Why writers need editors

Pamela Hewitt

Writers and editors have a wonderfully symbiotic relationship. The connection can be both intimate and rewarding. ‘Almost like a marriage,’ a client once remarked. I don’t know if I’d go that far, but an editor working intensively on a text does become finely attuned to the rhythms and nuances of a particular writer’s style. You learn to live a little in the writer’s head. If not quite nuptial, the relationship is certainly delicate.

There are opinions. There are egos.

Despite the close links in their roles and their mutual interest in language, communication and style, there’s room for better understanding between writers and editors. It’s even more desirable now, because writers need editing more than ever.

Why should this be so? Not surprisingly, the devil is in the dollar. Once upon a time, (yes, I know this reads like a fairy story), publishing houses employed in-house editors to work with writers. Promising authors were signed up in the expectation that their work would need editing. Structural editing on a major work might take months. These days, publishers are cutting costs and the brunt of it is felt in the editing rather than the marketing department. Editing is more likely to be outsourced. Writers might never meet or even talk to their freelance editor. More seriously, publishers are much less likely to take a risk. A manuscript is unlikely to be accepted in the first place unless it is considered virtually ready to be published.

This leaves authors with a problem, and several ways to solve it. Unless you are truly gifted, very lucky and a born editor as well as writer, your unsolicited manuscript is not likely to emerge triumphant from the publisher’s slushpile. One way of making your work stand out is to make sure it’s free from the presentational and structural errors that will almost automatically consign it to oblivion.

How?

Hire an editor
Many writers work with editors before submitting their manuscript to a publisher. They feel they need a trained, ‘objective eye’, especially when they have spent years on the text and can’t approach it as a fresh, critical reader.

The literary editor’s job is not to impose a style on the writer, but to help bring out the writer’s unique voice. It’s to guide and suggest, but not dictate. Editors also provide technical assistance with grammar and spelling, but this is a minor part of the process.

The literary editor concentrates on narrative technique—this could include matters such as voice, characterisation, point of view, interior monologue, repetition, dialogue, style and structure. Editors bring their own life experience and research skills to the task and might also assist the writer with expert information, for example knowledge of foreign languages or a particular period in history.

An editor might also give advice on ethical and copyright issues. Perhaps as important as any of these things is a friendly, yet critical eye. Writing is a solitary trade. To be actively, critically, intelligently and professionally read is enormously useful to writers, especially new writers.

Editing could be the right option for a writer intending to self-publish, who wants the finished product to be as professional and well presented as possible. It might be the choice for a writer from a non-English-speaking background who wants to be read without first language interference. Writers who believe in their work and who want to give it that extra boost in the publication stakes often decide that editing is worth the extra money and effort.

Payment for editing can be difficult for writers to rustle up. Professional editors are unlikely to accept an offer of half the royalties on an unpublished book in lieu of payment. (I have declined just such an offer!)

The do-it-yourself approach
Over the years, I’ve noticed that many people who come to my literary editing workshops and lectures are there not because they want to become a literary editor, but because they want to learn how to edit their own work.

Not one to miss an opportunity to fill a need for editing education and training, I’ve developed a series of online courses that teach precisely these skills. The courses cover the basics of literary editing, as well as specialist modules. They cover fiction and non-fiction. There’s one on manuscript assessment and one on creative fiction. Others cover interviewing techniques for fiction and non-fiction writers and editors, genre, editing for writers and scholars and that old chestnut, grammar and punctuation for editors and writers.

These courses are designed for writers and editors alike and will be presented as workshops at the NSW Writers’ Centre (see www.nswwriterscentre.org.au for times and dates). Participants will receive a free copy of the online course as part of their enrolment.

If you can't make the workshops, you can enrol in the online courses. I will be publishing the new online series, Editing for writers from February to July 2007. The first cab off the rank is Showing, not telling Literary editing, an overview of the techniques of literary editing.

© Pamela Hewitt 2007
www.emendediting.com

A quiz for aspiring editors

Pamela Hewitt

So you think you know all about editing? Test your knowledge and feel free to have a good time while you're at it. As promised last week, here are the answers.

A kern is

• a Scottish hut
• a grain used in Swedish breakfast food
• spacing between letters
• spacing between paragraphs
• a composer of musical comedies

A kern is the spacing between letters. It developed in the days of hot metal printing and continues to this day with electronic printing technology. Only the more sophisticated word processing software allows for kerning.

Stet means

• let it stand
• so be it
• and so on
• province, in Afrikaans
• to keep within limits

Stet means let it stand in Latin. It’s a standard proofing and copyediting mark to ‘undo’ a change made in error.

Which word(s) are spelt correctly?

• supersede
• accomodation
• neccessarily
• seperately
• desicate

Only supersede is correct. The others should be accommodation, necessarily, separately and desiccate.

A widow is

• a typo for a glassed-in section of a wall
• a broken paragraph with the first line at the foot of a page
• a broken paragraph with the last line at the top of a page

A widow is a broken paragraph with the last line at the top of a page. It's easy to remember because a widow ends up alone.

Author-date is used

• when referring to writers whose best work is behind them
• when Vancouver or documentary note is not house style
• to give readers the author’s date of birth under the copyright and ISBN information
• in secret editors’ code to refer to a derivative manuscript

Author-date is used when Vancouver or documentary note is not the house style. These are all systems for citation used in footnotes and endnotes.

A literal is

• a typographical error
• part of the coastline
• someone who doesn’t understand subtlety

A literal is a typographical error.

As you know, Bob, refers to

• the phrase that, in the 1930s, developed into ‘Bob’s your uncle’
• an info dump in fiction writing
• an ingratiating opening statement made by a hopeful author to a publisher.

As you know, Bob, refers to an info dump in fiction. This is when information needed to understand the plot is provided in dialogue in a way that is unnatural and awkward. (‘As you know, Bob, the time travelling machine was invented in the early twenty-second century, allowing people to move backwards and forwards in history.’)

Shovelware is

• a section of garden supply shop
• a trade name for coffee table books on gardening
• print material transferred uncritically to the web

Shovelware is print material transferred uncritically to the web.

Link rot is

• degeneration of the patella
• a broken hypertext connection
• appalling nonsense masquerading as logic in academic texts

Link rot is a broken hypertext connection.

The @ symbol is known as

• the snail
• the elephant’s trunk
• the monkey's tail
• the little mouse

All of them are correct. In French, Italian, Hebrew and Korean the symbol is called the snail, in Danish it’s the elephant’s trunk, in Dutch the monkey’s tail and in Chinese it’s known as the little mouse. Other names are the cat’s foot (Swedish) and the little dog (Russian). English has no name other than the description, ‘at sign’ . The Cambridge Guide to English Usage calls it ‘a symbol in search of a name'.

© Pamela Hewitt 2006

www.emendediting.com

You can find the answers to all these questions (and many, many more) in Emend Editing courses.

Wishin' and hopin'

Pamela Hewitt

The blog has been quiet for a couple of weeks. Among other distractions, I'm putting the finishing touches on the third issue of The Fine Print and, with Shelley Kenigsberg, preparing for a night of wine, women and song titled 'The Editor, the Writer, the Book and Their Covers', coming soon to the Society of Editors (Victoria, Inc.)

Here's a taste of things to come. (Singing along is recommended.)

Wishin’ and hopin’ and thinkin’ and prayin’
Plannin’ and dreamin’ of book sales that soar
That won’t get you in the bookstore
So if you’re lookin’ to write books that sell
All you gotta do is draft and redraft and redraft
The path to writing well

You’ve gotta find an editor, it’s no sin
Do the things she recommends
Purple prose? In the bin, ’cause
You won’t get there
Thinkin’ and a-prayin’, wishin’ and a-hopin’

’cause wishin’ and hopin’ and thinkin’ and prayin’
Plannin’ and dreamin’ ’bout winning the Vogel Prize
Creativity plus editing is wise
So if you’re plannin’ to be the next JK Rowling

What you gotta do is structure, restructure, read widely, write clearly
Yeah, just do it
And after you do, your book might win

You’ve gotta find an editor, it’s no sin
Do the things she recommends
Purple prose? In the bin, ’cause
You won’t get there
Thinkin’ and a-prayin’, wishin’ and a-hopin’

’cause wishin’ and hopin’ and thinkin’ and prayin’
Plannin’ and dreamin’, those contracts you’ll miss
That won’t get you on the shortlist
So if you’re thinkin’ of how great the writing life is

Don’t you worry ’bout the Nobel, the Vogel, the Booker, just cook ’er
Yeah, just do it
And if you do well, your book might sell
your book might sell
your book might sell

revised lyrics by Pamela Hewitt, with apologies to Hal David
'Wishin' and hopin' was written by Burt Bacharach, lyrics by Hal David, sung by Dusty Springfield, 1964 (Dionne Warwick released an earlier version in 1963).

The perils of publish or perish

Pamela Hewitt

This is the article I mentioned in 'Lost in globalisation', an earlier blog piece. It was published in the January issue of Vocabula Review, and is presented here with the phrases dogsbody and argue the toss reinstated for Australian readers.

Academic English is in a class of its own: last refuge of the intact infinitive, nursing home for Latin plurals. Where else do you find foci and fora gallivanting about in documents? Do people anywhere else follow the mid-eighteenth-century habit of using the indefinite article an before the word historical? Ah, the groves of academe.

It would all be quite quaint, if it weren't for the problem that writing like this excludes some readers, and irritates others. Worse, young scholars are trained to churn out tired language and stale forms. Academics, like any other writers, need to ask who their audience is. It wouldn't be a bad idea to take this further, asking who the audience should be, or could be. If an idea is worthwhile, it is worth expressing in a clear, uncluttered, logical way, preferably in the language of the reader. The silliest convention that lingers in much (although not all) academic writing is the use of Latin words, dropped into the text on the assumption that absolutely everybody understands them. Instead of for example, we read e.g. (sometimes, unfortunately, eg). Instead of that is, it's i.e. And let's not forget ibid., op. cit., loc. cit., passim, and all those Latin terms so often misused in academic citations. For the sad truth is that hardly any scholars know how to use these terms properly. Meaning is often confused, and much of the time of the academic editor is spent fixing up the errors in Latin usage, putting full stops after the al. in et al., to highlight a common culprit.

French and, more rarely, German and Italian terms are still used without explanation in many humanities texts. If it's a long time since Latin was routinely taught in our schools, it's also true that academic writers can no longer assume a working knowledge of modern European languages among their readership. In Australia, a smattering of Indonesian or Chinese is a more probable byproduct of a sound general education these days, yet dropping Asian terms into non-specialist texts has not caught on. It was never a good idea for academic writers to restrict understanding of their work to the graduates of private schools and elite public schools. If writers in the twenty-first century wish to write for an audience consisting largely of an over-40 elite, then they should by all means use Latin terms and pepper their scholarly prose with foreign terms. But wouldn't it be simpler to use English, or at least offer translations of foreign words?

Good scholarly writing is lucid and accessible without compromising its academic integrity. While there are times when academic language needs to use specialist terminology, obfuscation usually indicates that authors don't know what they mean. If a reasonably intelligent non-specialist reader has no idea what a text is saying, it's a sign that something's wrong with the way it's expressed.

Alongside this tendency to hide meaning behind a thicket of unhelpful words is the tradition of excessive signposting in academic writing. With some brave exceptions, university departments teach some of the best minds of each generation to write formulaically, especially when producing theses. At the beginning of each chapter, the scholar-in-training tells readers what they are about to read, then goes ahead and presents the information. Not content with this level of repetition, the argument is summarised at the end of the chapter, and despairing readers are then reminded of what they read at the beginning of the next. As any editor knows, this degree of clutter and repetition is counterproductive. It is the scaffolding good writers dispense with if it survives the first draft.

A related virus infecting scholarly prose is an inability to make an unqualified statement. It would appear that and there is evidence to suggest that or there is some support for the argument that are mealy-mouthed excuses for presenting original analysis.

There are signs of change. Contemporary scientific scholarship now accepts first-person reports. With the acknowledgment that people conduct experiments in laboratories and the field, the tortuous passive language of science is disappearing. It's a relief to read we conducted the experiment rather than the experiment was conducted.

The first editing world I found myself in was academic editing. There were no editing courses, or none that I knew of, so I searched for guiding principles in the workplace. It wasn't long before I noticed that the desire to argue the toss with the editor was in inverse proportion to the quality of the writer's style and the intellectual contribution of the work.
I also discovered that in scholarly manuscripts there were always discrepancies between the dates listed in the text and those in the bibliography. This is an ironclad rule, in my experience. I understand how it happens — tiny details like this are difficult to get right, a paper is circulated in one year, then printed as part of the conference proceedings in another — but I still find it a puzzling contradiction that a working environment that prizes accuracy and consistency and that attracts more than its fair share of pedants should throw up so many trivial errors, so consistently.

For fun, I kept a running list of words and phrases that caught my eye in the texts that crossed my desk. Some memorable examples were the workingclassisation of the North Korean people and the news that China's scientific modernisation was occurring in a somewhat headlong rush. An endearing typo that was picked up before it went to the printer was Gunadong for Guangdong. The mistake lent a delightfully Australian flavour to the name for the southern Chinese province. But the best example of a scholarly typo from that era must remain the famous one from the university's annual report featuring the Department of Hymen Paleontology. No copies survived, or so the story went, because the entire run was pulped.

Universities are profoundly divided institutions, and this may be one of the reasons for the lack of style in scholarly writing. The chasm between academic and administrative staff remains wide and deep. Editors are often classified as research assistants and occupy a precarious position somewhere between dogsbody and apprentice academic. Could this be why the views of editors on language are not taken seriously? In my experience, an editor's advice is generally taken with the same degree of serious consideration as any specialist recommendation in a government department or a business organisation — but not in universities.

None of this would matter if the work done in universities were unimportant. If there is nothing much worth communicating, then there is no problem about academics talking only to themselves. Yet if we are to have scholars who influence community debate — more than the familiar public intellectuals who are wheeled out for their opinion piece in the metropolitan dailies or their five minutes on current-affairs radio and TV — it would be helpful if the quality of academic writing improved.

© Pamela Hewitt
www.emendediting.com

Are you obsessive enough to be an editor?

Robyn Colman

Some editors, I have heard, worry about being right-angle people (my graphic-designer friend’s polite phrase for ‘anal retentive’). Of course editors are worriers by nature – can a good editor ever relax before a deadline and without a drink? But I think the real question is not ‘Am I too obsessive about things?’ but ‘Am I obsessive enough?’ So I have devised a little quiz to help you place yourself on the scale of obsessiveness.

Office
1(a) Do you like to line up the objects on your desk so that they are parallel or at right-angles to each other before you start work?

Yes

No

1(b) Do you need to line up the objects on your desk so that they are parallel or at right-angles to each other before you start work?

Yes

No

2 Do you clean your desk weekly or more often than weekly?

Yes

No

3 Have you sorted and stored your pens in different colour groups – all the pinks, all the greens, all the purples, all the reds, all the blues, all the blacks? (You don’t have pink or purple pens? Tsk.)

Yes

No

4 Have you sorted and stored your pencils in different capacities – 2B, 3B, blue pencil, etc.

Yes

No

5 Do you clean your eraser?

Yes

No

6 When you put a new toner or ink cartridge into your printer do you immediately order or buy another one?

Yes

No

7 Do you need to be restrained in shops like Officeworks, Pepe’s Papierie and kikki.K?

Yes

No

8 Do you back up more often than once a day?

Yes

No

9(a) Do you archive old work files from your computer?

Yes

No

9(b) Do you archive old paper files?

Yes

No

10 Do you have a book diary or a portable electronic diary?
both

Book

Portable electronic

Both

11 Have you been saving items specifically for your accreditation portfolio since 2003?

Yes

No

Home
12(a) Are your clothes stored by type (all trousers together, all shirts together, all t-shirts together, and so on)?

Yes

No

12(b) Are your clothes stored by colour?

Yes

No

12(c) Are your clothes by colour within type or by type within colour?

Yes

No

13(a) When you hang out washing, do you hang socks and pyjamas (if worn) in pairs?

Yes

No

13(b) When you hang out the washing, do you like to hang things in categories – all socks together, all shirts together, all tea towels together?

Yes

No

13(c) Do you like to match the colour of pegs for each item or pair of items (for instance, do you like to use the same colour of peg for each of a pair of socks, and two or three pegs of the same colour for each towel)?

Yes

No

14 Do you use an iron more often than ‘rarely’ or ‘almost never’?

Yes

No

15 Do you have more than one ‘miscellaneous cooking tools’ category – for example, one for spoons, ladles and whisks, another for wooden spoons and another for Teflon-coated implements?

Yes

No

16 Are books by the same author in your library shelved in order of publication or in alphabetical order of title?

Yes

No

17 Do you clean your glasses every time you put them on?

Yes

No

18 Do you always know where your house and car keys are?

Yes

No

19 Do you know the call numbers of your favourite radio stations in case the power goes off and the one-touch programming is lost?

Yes

No

20 Do you make lists?

Yes

No

21 When you leave the house or office, do you try to walk on or over the same number of cracks in the footpath with each foot?

Yes

No

Scoring
1(a)

Yes: 5

No: 0

1(b)

Yes: 5

No: 0

2

Yes: 5

No: 0

3

Yes: 5

No: 0

4

Yes: 5

No: 0

If you don’t have use numbered B pencils, deduct 5. HB is not good enough.
5

Yes: 5

No: 0

6

Yes: 5

No: 0

7

Yes: 5

No: 0

8

Yes: 5

No: 0

9(a)

Yes: 5

No: 0

9(b)

Yes: 5

No: 0

10

Book: 5

Portable electronic: 0

Both: 5

The scoring is not a mistake, it’s just that I have a prejudice against portable electronic organisers but respect someone who has a belt and braces approach.
11

Yes: 5

No: 0

12(a)

Yes: 5

No: 0

12(b)

Yes: 5

No: 0

12(c)

Yes: 5

No: 0

13(a)

Yes: 5

No: 0

13(b)

Yes: 5

No: 0

13(c)

Yes: 5

No: 0

14

Yes: 5

No: 0

15

Yes: 5

No: 0

16

Yes: 5

No: 0

17

Yes: 5

No: 0

18

Yes: 5

No: 0

19

Yes: 5

No: 0

20

Yes: 5

No: 0

Your memory may be good but what about the anxiety factor?
21

Yes: 5

No: 0

How did you go?
0–70: You need to worry more.

75–110: You are obsessive enough to be a good editor, though remember, it’s not just about being neat and clean. (There are also the Australian Standards for Editing Practice.)

115–135: You are mad — possibly too mad to be good at your job, but then again …

© Robyn Colman 2006
www.word-wise.com.au