This person doesn't know the meaning of "edit."

On DC Craigslist:

Editing a book (work at home)

Looking for a student majoring in English or comparative lit to edit a book translated from Polish. This has to be done quickly, ideally by year-end, starting immediately. Principals only.

****

I had to respond to the post:

I can barely believe your post. You're looking for someone -- a bilingual student -- with no editing experience to take on a book manuscript, in translation no less. You've got a lot to learn -- that is, everything -- about editing and publishing.

In one short ad, you have reduced the value of experience in the editing profession to virtually zero.

Maybe you'll find a little "editor" in your Xmas stocking Sunday morning. More likely you'll find pieces of coal.

Advertising with forked tongue

Mobiledia.com is looking for a staff writer. Its ad on Mediabistro.com includes this mixed message:

"Our ideal candidate has also cursed at an editor and threatened to resign at least once because some idiot wanted to change his or her perfect lede."

But later in the ad: "We don't focus on output. Instead, we try to develop good writers. We believe if we can help you write better, everything else will fall into place. We'll challenge you to push yourself and grow, but we also offer support through coaching and mentorship."

Guess what: You can't have it both ways.

Editing and trash collection have more in common than most people realize.

Lean, Mean Editing Machines

Experienced editors understand that, in the grand scheme of things, we shouldn't sweat the small stuff, despite what any style manual or guidelines dictates. The readers will never know the difference anyway.

I remember an upperclassman telling me, shortly after I arrived at Rutgers, that the secret to success in college (given the enormous reading and workload) is to figure out what you can get away with not doing.

IMHO the same is true for editing.

The more I edit, the more I ignore, within reason. In the last book I worked on, I dispensed with changing e.g. and i.e. to you know what. Beginning with my current book, "he or she" and their variations will remain undisturbed.

When I was a managing editor, my direction to my staff and freelancers was "efficiency: the maximum quantity/quality output with the minimum input." I continue to manage myself toward that goal.

The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Part II

Yesterday I completed my edit of a particularly difficult manuscript (see 5/26 entry).

It pretty much took all the editing out of me, and I have struggled today to do any online article editing—my second gig along with book editing.

I believe I am suffering from a condition that the American Psychiatric Association needs to include in its DSM: PTESD, or Post-Traumatic-Editing Stress Disorder.

A haiku to celebrate the end of a project

Editing’s Dark Secret
The manuscript sucks
Writer should keep his day job
Half-hearted edit

Deep Questions

How many editors can dance on the head of a writer?

If an editor corrects a typo and no reader is aware that the typo ever existed, has the edit actually been made?

In sicness [sic] and in health

One of my fellow editors asked for my opinion the other day related to "[sic]." I've got her back, she's got mine.

V: Quoted material in MS: "Despite any efforts put into the surge, the first six months of 2007 was still. . ." Would you insert [sic] after "was"?

ME: Either that or just fix it without the sic, to not draw attention to it. Of course I couldn't find this in CM [Chicago Manual of Style], but aren't we allowed to simply fix errors of this kind?

V: So I should change the "was" to "were" and leave it at that? Suppose that would work.

ME: It works for me. Who's going to object?

A First in My 27 Years of Editing

As I approach the end of my first proofing pass through a horribly written book, I am struck by what a struggle it must have been for this poor schnook of an author to complete the book.

He reached down deep and employed redundancy and wordiness almost at will to reach the finish line.

And I almost wish I had been there to cheer him on. Almost.

After all these years, could I be mellowing? I hope not—too much empathy will destroy the gatekeeper.

Where Bad Writing Goes To Die

Here's how my online article editing job works in terms of article selection.

After I log in, I pull up my queue which contains ten titles ready for editing. I can select any one of the ten. Once I pick one, I can do one of three things with it: edit/approve/submit it, edit it and submit it to the writer for a rewrite (this generally seeks clarification), or save it back to the hold area of my queue. If I choose the latter, I have 24 hours to edit it.

If, however, I don't return to that article within 24 hours, it will go back into general circulation for another editor to select.

It is reasonable to conclude that many editors use this option to avoid working on articles that are so badly written, they can't bear the thought of spending an inordinate amount of time to salvage them. After all, we're paid per article, so working on articles of this nature cuts deeply into our hourly pay.

I exercised this option today with an article about online banking. The introduction contained these nuggets:

"Traditional banking and all it alludes is slowly becoming a thing of the past." And: "Online banking gives you access to self serving features."

That was more than enough for me to send the article post haste to the Death Pool. I would imagine that there are some articles out there that don't see the light of day for quite a while, as one editor after another throws them into the dark abyss.

An Idea Whose Time Has Come

I just started editing a new manuscript. I was immediately faced with huge swaths of quoted material without references.

I think it's time that our profession organize in an attempt to stop this crap from reaching our desks, computers, mailboxes, whatever.

And I have the perfect name for our organization:

Commiserating

(A short conversation with two of my kindred spirits.)

ME (to V and J): "One's standards cannot possibly be maintained for two months!" In other words, and as you know, when we're working on a piece of crap for what feels like forever, we reach a point when we pretty much go into an auto mode just to get the damned thing done. At that point, many of the items on our "final checklist" somehow don't seem necessary any longer.

V: That’s because at that point they aren’t necessary!

ME: And that begs the question, debated ad nauseum by our brethren and sistren, How much of what we do is truly necessary?

J: Depends—if you ask the general stupido, s/he will say barely anything; just catch the typos. If you ask those who know (writers, for instance), they’ll say a lot, “as long as it isn’t my writing!”

Something's Gotta Give

The Time-Cost-Scope paradigm is simple and goes something like this:

In considering any kind of output (e.g., goods and services), there is an ideal equilibrium or balance among the inputs T, C, and S that results in the most efficient and effective way to achieve the desired output. If you alter any one of the three inputs, this changes the "weight" of the other two and creates an imbalance or disequilibrium.


For example, let's say it takes me one hour to do an in-depth edit of five pages of material for which I charge $35. If I rush through the material and complete my edit in a half hour, the quality suffers.

And this is exactly what happened with my online editing, freelance job. The rate of pay is $3.50 per article. So the only way I could make a reasonable per-hour wage was to race through articles, thus impacting the quality. This approach quickly becomes apparent to the copy chiefs, who scrupulously review and critique the work of the copy editors.

We occasionally need to consider how much our time is worth. It's hard to argue with the position that $7 an hour is better than zero. But is that hourly wage something that a self-respecting professional would accept?

As a friend and fellow editor put it, "Those folks are running a sweat shop!" I concurred, thanked my team leader for the opportunity, and told her that I was giving up the position.

The Insolent Incumbent

I edited a Request for Information (RFI) yesterday for a federal contract for which my company is the incumbent. It's a multi-year contract, and the RFI is a formality; simply some mid-contract documentation to support the continuation of our work with the government client.

The resume section was a mess—several entirely blank "Summary of Experience" sections and numerous entries that I queried.

When the proposal coordinator released the edited files to the project manager for review, he told her that he didn't have time to look at the files. She told him the files had extensive edits visible with the "Track Changes" function on, and that there were queries that required his attention. He repeated that he wasn't going to review my work, and that it really didn't matter as we're the incumbent contractor.

This begs the question, Why even bother to send projects like this through Editing and Desktop Publishing?

Don’t go to sleep edit angry.

Editors, when they’re working, can be a very angry bunch. With apologies to Alexander Pope, if we had a motto it could be, “To err is human, to forgive is out of the question.”

Whether it’s ignoring style manuals and publishing guidelines, and demonstrating that they’ve forgotten or are rejecting what they learned in English and writing classes, many authors really get our knickers in a twist.

The book I’m currently editing is filled with so much crap (nonsensical writing, seriously incomplete references, free-for-all capitalization and punctuation, end note numbers in text not matching end notes, etc.), I’ve been pissed off almost the entire time I’ve been at this edit—more than a month now, part time.

And, my, how my anger has affected my work. As I close in on the Wednesday deadline (appropriately falling on April Fools’ Day), I find more and more things I’ve missed, from the introduction straight through to the conclusion.

As far as I can recall, when I started my editing career back in the eighties I didn’t experience this anger phenomenon. It began perhaps a couple of years ago.

My inner, angry editor is actually uncharacteristic—I’ve grown more tolerant, of everything, as I’ve matured. To what, then, do I attribute this powerful reaction to author errors that earlier didn’t even cause a ripple? One word: BURNOUT.

Phone home!

Tuesday is my FT job’s work-at-home day.

My manager told me yesterday that I’d have a “messy, cut and pasted” 10-page document to edit this morning.

I sent her two emails last night—one via Outlook, the other by gmail—requesting that she call me when the document was ready. This, so I don’t have to plant myself in front of the computer—waiting, waiting.

Not having received a phone call, I checked my email at 10:15. She had sent a message with the document attached at 9:30. I responded (at 10:15), “OK. Here goes.”

She called me at 11, telling me that I hadn’t attached the edited document to my 10:15 message, and inquired where it was.

The document turned out to be a particularly messy 15 pages, as expected, and yet she expected that I had it finished in 45 minutes.

Remember Cool Hand Luke? “What we have here is a failure to communicate.”

Persona non grata

Yesterday a proposal manager (in charge of a group of writers) sent a query to one of our two proposal coordinators (they shepherd proposals through the production process).

Unlike most PMs, he knows there is something called style and wants to consider it before his writers begin their work on the proposal.

He asked her the following style questions: (1) Ft. Monmouth or Fort Monmouth? (2) Service Desk or service desk? (3) information assurance or Information Assurance? (4) Periods at the end of bulleted items or not? (5) Army/DoD Group, or Army and DoD Group?

Not only did she not refer his questions to me, her response was that (1) the items weren't that important, (2) he and his writers could decide, and (3) “the Editor will also try and catch any inconsistency that was missed by the writers.”

Let's break down the three elements of her response. First, how we treat each of these items is what style is all about. Second, I’ve been charged with developing and enforcing house style. Third, I am a nameless editor who will “try” to catch errors.

Because she cc'd me on the e-mail thread, I responded to his questions with specific answers for each item. He thanked me. She didn’t even acknowledge my e-mail to him.

Again, editing is a thankless job, and it is made even more so (what is less than thankless?) when our role is ignored or, worse, undermined.

Out of the Loop

The first thing I do when editing each proposal section is to review the graphics for errors. These are the elements of the proposal created by our graphic artists that I can’t access (edit) through Word. I mark them up and hand them off to a proposal coordinator for assignment to one of the graphics staff.

All too often the proposal coordinator tells me that the graphics in question have already been replaced. I don’t know—or care—if the new versions have been proofed. Why don’t I care?

First, because, despite an explicit directive from the proposal center manager that every graphic should come to me for proofing before it is placed into a proposal, that rarely happens. And second, the proposal coordinators consistently fail to apprise me of the status of material that I’m responsible for editing.

I am plagued by dysfunctional management and supervision.

Ten things about editing

1. Always have a plan B. (Backup your files.)

2. Don’t hold your breath waiting for thanks. (It’s an ungrateful world out there; one in which most editors are invisible.)

3. If you are not absolutely the last person to touch a “product” before it goes out the door, you can count on someone else screwing it up. (That’s why there’s version control.)

4. Learn to live with clutter. (Keep hard and soft copies until works are published. Questions arise and revisions take place.)

5. Many people are overly sensitive and easily offended. (Reread every author query that you write. Then wait. Then read it again before sending it.)

6. Never let your guard down. (If you read ten pages of clean text, page 11 will contain errors.)

7. Save, save, save. (Computers crash. Enough said.)

8. The devil is in the details. (Read very single character on every page.)

9. Use every tool at your disposal. (Always run spell and grammar checks.)

10. Whether or not you succeed in a job doesn’t necessarily relate to your performance. (The best editor in the world will fail if he’s not a team player.)

Abracadabra

I used to work for a company that valued editors, understood that quality editing takes time, and built sufficient time into production schedules to allow that to happen. Managers often told us that it was time to “do your magic” when they gave us assignments. This is not the case where I currently work.

Yesterday I received word that next Tuesday I’ll receive 125 pages—the technical part of a proposal—to edit by COB Wednesday. I’m supposed to receive the material around noon. If the past is a prelude, that means around 5 p.m.

I have repeatedly told the proposal coordinators that I can edit roughly seven pages an hour; on average. If the writers don't follow our style rules (which is a near certainty), or if the material is badly written, that number can go way down. In addition, I’ve said that after about ten straight hours of editing, I've just about reached my daily limit.

Sadly, for me, this message has, and will continue, to fall on deaf ears.
It never ceases to amaze me how few people understand that a thorough edit cannot be done in the time period often allotted to editing. Those folks really do expect magic!