Copyeditors – all editorial professionals, really – come in many shapes and sizes, mentally and attitudinally.
But the good, experienced copyeditors share certain qualities and characteristics that make them the ones you want to hire. (Yes, this applies, too, to other kinds of editors and to proofreaders.)
I’m assuming technical competence, based on great foundational training, and an aptitude for the work. These eight qualities I’m looking at are the ones that make really good copyeditors stand apart from the crowd.
#1 Humility
Not in a Uriah Heep way, nor yet in an Obadiah Slope way! Ugh.
No, good copyeditors display genuine humility thus:
- knowing they don’t know it all (and certainly not better than an author who is an expert in their field, or about the world built by a fiction author)
- looking stuff up, particularly apparently misspelt words, or words that appear to be out of context (could be a technical term, or a term of art – and you won’t know unless you look it up. I still remember encountering ‘immanent’ for the first time and deciding at the last moment, as my finger twitched over the keyboard to make the ‘obvious’ correction, to look it up. That’s a feeling you don’t forget!)
- knowing that the needs of the publisher or other client, as expressed in the brief, override their own personal preferences
- knowing that their work, above all, should be invisible to the reader and as faithful to the author’s voice as the publisher’s style guide permits.
Being humble doesn’t mean you’re a martyr to imposter syndrome, though. I’m not asking that of you.
Humility also relates to the next important quality…
#2 Great people skills
Most copyeditors sit at their desks beavering away quietly on their computers, avoiding phone and video calls, and in-person meetings, limiting involvement with others to email.
Fine – that’s me, too, for the most part, although I’m happy to video-conference as part of my networking with other editors – I’m not a complete troglodyte.
But that doesn’t mean that good copyeditors don’t need, and use, great people skills all day, every day.
Every decision whether to make a silent change or to raise an author query is the exercise of people skills. How that query is worded is a particularly delicate exercise of people skills. The aim is to elicit a helpful and accurate response from the author as easily as possible; never making that person feel they’ve been ambushed and mugged, no matter how thick and fast the queries come.
Such skills show in other ways too:
- managing deadlines so as not to wreck a publication schedule
- carrying out only essential, and well-organised, communication with desk-editor clients who are inevitably up to their eyeballs juggling multiple projects
- anticipating problems and giving the clients maximum notice, with proposals for a solution
- writing handover notes that serve the needs of the client and don’t require that client to have been resident in your head to understand what you’re talking about
- remaining polite and professional despite provocation to be otherwise!
#3 Understanding of their place in the process
Good copyeditors know their place!
They will understand, at least in outline, what has gone before and, importantly, what will come afterwards. They know that they are not top dog, and that their own needs are not paramount, so meeting deadlines is important, for instance.
Good copyeditors know that, although they may work alone, they are nevertheless part of a process, and have the power to impact other people favourably or disastrously.
Knowing what comes after is most important because that influences how you write your handover notes, what comments you leave in the files and what you tell an author who asks ‘what’s next?’. For these things to be effective, you need to be able to put yourself in the shoes of the people receiving the files from you, anticipate their needs and meet them.
#4 Broad knowledge
Good copyeditors are fact-magpies! They have a broad, extensive (admittedly, probably quite shallow in many areas) general knowledge that triggers their Spidey-sense when something isn’t quite right.
They may not be able to put their fingers on quite why, but somewhere in the distant recesses of their minds, a long-ago nugget of fact has pinged, enough to send the copyeditor to Google (other search engines are, of course, available) with a vague sense of unease about what they’ve just read in the text they’re editing.
Maybe it’s the spelling of a name (that a Dennis should lose an N, or an Ian gain an I) that they decide to look up, or a historical date that feels wonky, or, as in a book I recently edited, a description of a poster suggesting that it echoed Second World War fascism (nope, but it was a dead ringer for Soviet-era communism, and I could produce evidence sufficient for the author to change their text), or weird and wonderful stuff of the kind that comes up in the quiz shows and documentaries a lot of us are devotees of (you call it couch-potato; I call it research).
The best copyeditors will develop a sixth sense that nudges them to just check something out, saving embarrassment all round (and then check what you’ve found with your author – they may well know something you don’t).
#5 Recognising that perfection doesn’t exist, but excellence does
In the editorial forums I frequent, I often see editors, especially new editors, but not exclusively so, twisting themselves in knots in pursuit of perfection. I hate to break it to you, but perfection – objective perfection that every author and every reader will admire – does not exist. Give the same text to half a dozen editors and, although there will be great overlap, there will be changes that some people feel obliged to make that others don’t, and the text will survive just fine with or without them.
Give that same text to an untrained reader and they’ll probably pick up a few things that the editors do, but miss several; they are likely, too, to decide that perfectly (ha!) innocent text needs changing because ‘I’d not have written it that way’ (see #1, Humility!).
A good copyeditor will work to the client’s brief, and that may mean letting things go to print that you definitely wouldn’t have written that way yourself. Well, fine – it’s not your book. It’s the author’s as filtered through the publisher’s style.
Making changes for the sake of showing you’ve been meticulous in the pursuit of perfection, when the text was good enough before, is a folly. The client and the author (whether or not they are the same person) won’t thank you (especially if your role is proofreader), and you, as an editorial professional, are eroding the hourly rate you’re achieving (if on a fixed fee) or inflating your fee (if you’re on an hourly rate).
#6 Flexibility
Well, within reason. Flexibility means, to me, not having ‘my’ way of editing, but of becoming properly familiar with the style guide for the text I’m working on and if today that means spelling numbers out to ten, but tomorrow spelling them out to ninety-nine, so be it.
It doesn’t mean making yourself a doormat, just to be clear.
It does mean being responsive to the way an author wants to engage in the process of being edited; one size doesn’t fit all; your size definitely doesn’t fit all!
So this ties in with #2, people skills. Neat, huh? Anyone would start to think these qualities are interrelated!
#7 Scoffs at ‘rules’
Or, rather, scoffs at the idea of ‘rules’. Zombie rules (thou shalt not begin a sentence with a conjunction; thou shalt not split an infinitive…) should be given the heave-ho, except when the style of the text, and the intended readership, may make it preferable to observe such things.
There are no permanent rules in language. Syntax, the slowest to change, does change. Spelling, punctuation, grammar, styles of presenting headings, fashions around captions, all change. If you think they don’t, go read Chaucer in the original and try to convince yourself that it’s perfectly intelligible to any reader of English today without any additional effort.
In the sixteen (wow, soon seventeen) years I’ve been a freelance copyeditor, things have changed – no client has asked me to put ‘et al.’ in italics for years and years – some don’t even want it punctuated. Academic writing style has become more natural, a welcome loss of pomposity and gain in clarity, a much better reading experience. In my lifetime, UK publishers have stopped leaving spaces before punctuation; in my parents’ lifetimes, we’ve stopped hyphenating ‘today’, ‘tomorrow’ and ‘weekend’…
That doesn’t mean there aren’t current conventions that a good copyeditor will have mastered, but they’ll keep their eyes and ears open for changes to them.
Good copyeditors find it particularly important to be alert to changes, otherwise they might find themselves inventing their own zombie rules, then dying on the wrong linguistic hills, to the annoyance of their clients over the ensuing years. Move on! And this links neatly to the final quality in my list.
#8 Committed to lifelong learning
Things go out of date. Copyeditors beavering away in isolation may well fall behind the times, unaware of changes in technology, language, software tools and so on.
Good copyeditors keep their eyes and ears open for more than just linguistic changes – they are on the watch for tips, tricks and hacks (the good kind) to improve their efficiency and effectiveness, for new software, for changes to the laws governing how they run their businesses, for the whole zeitgeist of their corner of the publishing world.
They will go to conferences, attend formal training courses, read blogs, articles and books, and be active in editorial online spaces.
And they will enjoy it!
For good copyeditors, lifting their eyes from the screen in front of them to look around and see what’s going on is a totally natural thing to do.
