I was at lunch with some old friends from university when one of them decided to explain to me that my job is utterly unimportant, that no one cares about mistakes in books, and that nobody notices them, anyway.
Aside from being well towards the rude end of the thoughtless↔rude spectrum, my friend was also factually wrong.
People do notice mistakes, people do care about them – just witness comments on online retail sites and reviews just about anywhere – and errors in writing can have serious consequences.
My friend was also overlooking that they read only edited text with very few bloopers surviving, copyeditors already having done their work. If my friend had to read unedited text, they might have conceded that copyediting is a task worth doing…
Copyediting is important. Here are some reasons and examples.
The $5 million comma
This one’s a doozy. A missing comma in a contract cost Oakhurst Dairy in Maine millions and it was a comma decent copyediting should have sorted out – the editor would have queried its omission with the client and clarified the intended meaning. The BBC covered this story and similar ones – textual errors have consequences.
In business texts, a great deal of legal rectitude must be applied in certain contexts – labels, contracts, claims made for the product in advertising – but the text must also be engaging, readily understood by the customer, and right in every particular. Don’t give customers the chance to say to themselves, ‘Well, if that can’t even get that right, how can I trust them?’
When I worked in the Court Funds Office (the bit of the Supreme Court that handles private money in the court system), back in my salaried days, I had a real ding-dong with a solicitor over a comma in the Supreme Court Rules.
He was late paying in money that would have allowed his client’s case to go forward, so of course he was wriggling on the hook and desperately trying to get me to accept the payment (lodgment, in our terminology, no central E).
I refused, because that was actually the law it was my job to uphold. He argued that if a particular comma was missing from the applicable rule, he could make his lodgment.
I pointed out that it wasn’t missing, and that great care had been taken in the drafting of the Supreme Court Rules, so we could presume the comma was there to do a job of work and ensure that the particular rule was interpreted as intended.
As he was arguing that its absence changed the meaning, he couldn’t also argue that its presence didn’t have any significance, but that didn’t stop him from trying.
It ended with the solicitor in deep trouble with his client, but he vented his spleen on me by calling me a snivelling little civil servant. I told you people care about commas.
Academic rigour
Most of my queries for authors, and most of my corrections when copyediting scholarly work, arise from the references. Sometimes it’s a matter of getting a consistent layout throughout the references list, sometimes it’s correct spellings of author names, adding missing subtitles, correcting the date or publisher details (imprint pages can be awkward to interpret), adding issue numbers of journals, correcting page ranges, adding DOI numbers… I’ve gone on and on about that in earlier posts, on editing references and on the things authors can do to reduce their copyeditor’s queries. I always have a lot to say about references!
I also raise a lot of queries about inaccurate quoting, inaccurate page numbers for the source – and the quotation not being in the cited source at all.
I’m always grateful when I spot a citation of the wrong reference – that’s a good one to get put right.
And in one book on Shakespeare, I advised the author that the film poster for one of the plays was from a different scene from the one the author repeatedly claimed it was (including in the figure caption for that poster). Cue hasty redrafting by a grateful author.
These things matter to scholars. If your references can’t be relied upon, it raises doubts in your readers’ minds. If they can’t follow up your sources, can’t read the context of the quotation, or you get basic facts wrong, what does that say about the quality of your research, or the reliability of your text?
I’ve edited a book in which the surname of one of the figures under examination was misspelled throughout. What message would that give to the readers about the author’s academic rigour, command of the subject and attention to detail? And this was a professor emeritus, not some early-career scholar. Reputations can crumble.
Peer reviewers can be pretty devastating in their comments on draft articles and books when the writing is deficient, no matter how great the ideas and exposition.
Reader comfort
Whether reading fiction, scholarly nonfiction or an instruction manual, readers need to feel confident in the author. It’s the author’s job to do the hard work, not the reader’s job to work out what’s meant by tangled, misspelt writing with misleading punctuation and other inaccuracies. Editors support the author to do that hard work.
If there are continuity errors in fiction, the reader is hoicked out of the world of the story. Factual errors also annoy. Amongst your readers there will be people who know more about roads, guns, breeds of dog, architectural feature and so forth, than the author does, and these errors will be found, and quite possibly held up for public scrutiny in online reviews.
If references don’t work, figures are misnumbered or the title of the chapter differs from the one in the table of contents, readers lose that confidence in the writer’s authority.
If tabs and flanges and whatnot are mislabelled in instruction manuals, readers struggle to assemble their flatpack, or master the controls of their new tech toy, or whatever the case may be. Or perhaps they fail to apply for a government benefit, because they can’t work out what they’re meant to do and find the whole thing just too confusing and difficult.
In the academic world, if your reader is struggling to get through mangled, overlong sentences, or paragraphs that last for pages on end, or your writing is dense and confused, or your easily recognisable quotations aren’t acknowledged with proper citations, why should they read your text to the end, and recommend it to their friends, their students, their colleagues?
Why should they cite your article in their next one, if your points are lost in failed scholarly apparatus, or ambiguous phrasing?
Unclear writing can kill your article or book’s chances in the world. Decent copyediting will address all these issues.
The role of copyediting
The copyeditor’s job is to represent the reader, as well as the publisher, when working on a piece of text. Will the reader feel in safe hands as they turn the pages? Will the intended readership cope with 120-word sentences? Are the reader’s reasonable questions or objections properly catered for?
Copyediting tackles all these and more, with the editor fixing the things that are clearly and unequivocally wrong or raising author queries to have the author decide what to do about an issue.
Besides that, editors are smoothing out the English – editing out obvious typos, liaising with the author on ambiguous phrasing or half-finished drafting changes, ensuring the punctuation does the job it’s meant to, that every opening bracket has a closing one, that every reference has a citation, and every citation a reference.
The copyeditor will ensure that consistency is applied in the proper places (quotations are sacrosanct, no matter how much the spelling, grammar and punctuation differ from the rest of the text) and that the publisher gets a typescript in their house style.
The reader gets a book or article (or instruction manual) that works, where chapter titles, tables of contents, figure and table numbers, abbreviations in the text and in the abbreviations list, all hang together and function correctly. Beyond that, they get text that says what it’s meant to say.
Even in a throwaway novel, it matters. I read one eminently throwawayable novel when the cat with four week-old kittens in Chapter 7 was up to six week-old kittens two chapters, later, on the same day in the story’s timeline. And yes, a copyeditor will sort out whether that should be four week-old kittens or four-week-old kittens because those are very different things.
Then there are the novels where the sun is just setting at 6pm in south Wales in the week before Christmas, when the sun has in fact been down for a good two hours, and it would be hard to see someone dressed in black walking up the hill a mile or two away…
There are huge opportunities for continuity and/or timeline errors, let alone spelling, grammar and punctuation problems, in mass-market novels, and disappointed readers have many more chances now to vent that disappointment, reducing customer ratings and damaging sales.
The takeaway
Copyediting matters. Good copyediting, in particular, matters. It gets authors out of all kinds of messes – inaccuracies, infelicities and embarrassments. It lets readers settle into the text and read without wincing, tutting or hurling the offending book across the room in frustration. It ensures the correct information is conveyed to the reader, in an appropriate register.
And I have to say, getting all these things done is a satisfying way to spend my day.
