Ibidiot

I don't know if this is a hard-and-fast style rule (and I can't find it in any style manual), but I seem to recall that you shouldn't use ibid. more than five consecutive times in notes.

When an author strings together more than that, he's an ibidimwit and ibidumbskull who might suffer from ibidementia. Editing his notes ib nauseum lulls me into a feeling of ibidumdeedum.

Today's Fantasy

Dear Stupid, Lazy Sonofabitch Author:

In your nearly 700 notes (which you submitted as footnotes rather than endnotes per our submission guidelines), you failed to enclose within quotation marks a single report title.

There must be close to a hundred of them. In addition, you failed to italicize perhaps twenty or so book titles.

Also, you evidently couldn't make up your addled brain regarding the military vs. civilian treatment of how to structure a specific date.

Finally, your clearly schizoid approach to hyphenation and capitalization would seem to indicate an immediate need for treatment.

In closing, I can only say that all of the above, and so much more, perfectly represents the focus of your book: the fight against terrorism. For this editorial effort, I am the good guy and you are the terrorist.

Forever disrespectfully yours,

The Abyss

My current author's work represents a quantum leap downward into the stylistic netherworld, to depths even my worst writers to date don't even know exist.

He is, quite literally, an explorer and worthy of a Guinness World Record.

He has ignored with the wild abandon known only to the most adventurous among humankind, consistency in every possible way it can applied to a written work.

I am, for this project, not an editor, but a sanitary engineer.

One bad turn deserves another.

When I edit a manuscript, I normally turn off Track Changes when I do HTML-coding and formatting, and clean up the author's junk that is not related to content. I do this as a favor of sorts to make the author's review easier.

Those days are over. The manuscript I'm working on never should have been accepted in its current form, which is filled with more violations of submission guidelines than almost any I've seen.

Track Changes has been on from the moment I started this project and will never be turned off.

I'm going to fill this author's (and any of his kind in the future) world with every single change I make. His right margins will runneth over with the evidence of how much I had to do to bring his work to publication.

Lazy Author Syndrome

I'm working on a manuscript that has 948 endnotes (68 pages long).

There is not a single note that contains the full reference for a work, that is, first and last name of author, complete title of the work, location and name of publisher, date of publication―all of which are included in the bibliography―and page numbers.

So I have to laboriously go back and forth between the notes and bibliography files to copy and paste the missing information.

This is yet another example of a manuscript that the acquisition editor should have returned to the author, for him to complete the notes in order to provide an acceptable piece of work.

When I ran this information past my managing editor, he referred to this author as one who suffers from Lazy Author Syndrome. I told him that we should refer to these authors as Lassies.

Attitude

I edited an article entitled, "English Bulletin Boards for the Classroom." The writer completely disregarded the rules about how to compose the text descriptions and URLs for the "References" and "Resources" sections which provide links for readers who want additional information.

I sent the article back to the writer to address the aforementioned issues.

The writer resubmitted the article without fixing anything and included this comment: "I taught 7th and 8th grade English for 9 years."

My comment to the writer in my rejection of the article, based on not responding to my request nor following the style guidelines, was: "'I taught 7th and 8th grade English for 9 years' does not respond to my request that you review the guidelines regarding References and Resources. . . . Describing a Reference as 'More ideas' leaves something to be desired in terms of piquing the reader's interest, as does 'Even more ideas' for the Resource."

The shoe's on the other foot now, Teach.

Busted!

Earlier today I edited and approved an excellent article (for my online editing job) entitled, "About PMP Certification."

I just opened up another article to edit: "Project Management Professional Certification Requirements." It was written by the same author as the above article and is virtually identical in content.

I sent an alert to my team leader and the editorial team. His file will now be reviewed to determine if he has previously self-plagiarized.

Self-plagiarism is, within the context of the company's structure and processes, easy to get away with. That is, there are hundreds of editors, thousands of writers, and a largely random system of populating each editor's article review queue (ten at a time).

Evidently the stars are not aligned in this writer's favor today.

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.

This kind of thing could end up in my dreamscape.

My author of the moment is a Vietnam vet and first-time author. I'm editing his 400+ page, heavily referenced book on Vietnam.

The structure of references (the sequence of their elements) isn't complicated; even most high school students have this knowledge. And after I read his bio (he has an advanced degree from an Ivy League school), I figured the end notes would be OK. We don't always get what we want, do we.

Here's an example: "I owe the reference to Dean’s compelling Shook Over Hell, 41."

Conspicuous by their absence: author's first name, complete book title, city and name of publisher, publication year.

And the right way: "I owe the reference to Eric T. Dean Jr.’s compelling Shook Over Hell: Post-Traumatic Stress, Vietnam, and the Civil War (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997), 41."

While the writing itself isn't half bad, the end notes are my current cross to bear.

As the great philosopher Roseanne Roseannadanna would say, "Well, Jane, it just goes to show you, it's always something."