At 12:06 AM 4/16/2002 -0400, Joy Matkowski--appparently a
professional copy-editor--replied to my comments on
copy-editing with:
><an extended treatise on the responsibilities of a
copy-editor, concluding
>with...>
> OK. I was wound up. Now I'm wound down and can get
back to work.
>
>Joy, defensively
My knowledge of the duties of a copy-editor was based on some
guidelines put out by Theresa Nielson Hayden in her NESFA
book (whose title escapes me at the moment). It did include
fact-checking, at least to query the author. My comment was
not a shot at copy-editors, but rather publishers who've done
away with copy-editing--and proof-reading--to save money. In
the course of my reading, both fiction and non-fiction, I see
lots of books full of typos that convert one word into
another (e.g. ware into wane), that aren't caught by
spell-checkers, but would be caught by any reasonably
competent human. Add in tons of duplicated lines, dangling
references (see figure below, when the figure is above) and
logical inconsistencies that someone should have queried, and
my conclusion is that no-one actually read the damn thing at
the publishers after the initial draft.
Whose responsibility would this be? In one of the Executioner
novels, number 50-something (I won the first 140 in a bulk
lot on Ebay), at one point Mack Bolan gives his trusty
Beretta to a woman who needs protection. A few pages later,
he gets ambushed, and the "trusty Beretta Belle leaps into
his hand and spits fire into the night." Or some such
horseshit. Later, when the arch-villain is about to shoot our
trusty hero, the woman--the villain's wife--shoots him with
the Beretta that Mack had given her earlier. Who should have
found this logic flaw? The author, certainly, but for the
post-Pendleton Executioners, he's probably just a hack trying
to make word-count and meet deadline. The editor? The
copy-editor? Well, in this case, no one did. My guess is
there was no copy-editor, and the editor didn't care because
he had to get out one book a month, and this was just
hackwork anyway. Obviously the readers don't care, because
the Executioner is still going strong, some 300+ books into
the series.
But I see these kinds of problems even at big-name
publishers, and I suspect the problem is the publisher,
cutting back on production costs by eliminating multiple
drafts
(with editorial commentary) and copy-editing.
Ray
-- # To unsubscribe from the regular list, say "unsubscribe rara-avis" to # majordomo@icomm.ca. This will not work for the digest version. # The web pages for the list are at http://www.miskatonic.org/rara-avis/ .
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : 16 Apr 2002 EDT