Trump, New Yorker Style
Andrew Boynton applies the New Yorker‘s stringent copyediting rules to a statement from Donald Trump “in the interest of clarity.”
...morePosts Tagged: copyediting
Life Behind the Copy Desk
Reviewing Mary Norris’s Between You & Me: Confessions of a Comma Queen for The New Republic, Julia Holmes reflects on her own experience as a copy editor, as well as her place in the magazine class system.
...moreSerial Commas, Subordinate Clauses, and the New Yorker
Mary Norris has a gift for your favorite grammarian in this week’s New Yorker: a detailed account of comma policy from a veteran copyeditor. The magazine is notorious for its meticulous house style (where else do you still see a diaeresis over the word coördinate?), which it owes to Mensa-level punctuator Eleanor Gould and her […]
...moreCreativity Is Messy
Technically perfect writing is important when it comes to journalism or nonfiction, and especially helpful when writing with short deadlines. Fiction writing is different though. Nicole Bernier, over at Beyond the Margins, explains why grammatically sloppy writing might be the product of greater creativity: Sometimes when creative writers say they don’t notice their own typos, […]
...moreAuthor’s Notes
Writers and editors don’t always get along, but usually their squabbles remain private. Reviewer copies of Moriarty, a new Sherlock Holmes novel, were published and sent to places like the New York Times with notes from author Anthony Horowitz still included. The mistake reveals part of the sometimes secretive editing process, and, as Melville House […]
...moreThe Obsessive, Nerdy Joys of Copyediting
This conversation at the Millions between Edan Lepucki and her copyeditor Susan Bradanini Betz is a beautiful paean to the editing process—and enlightening for anyone who wonders what precisely a copyeditor does. Lepucki and Betz discuss author/editor compatibility, obsessive style sheets, and Donna Tartt’s anti-copyediting broadside. A preview: No, I can’t turn it off, but […]
...more
What Makes a Good Editor?
In a conversation for the Slate Book Review, author Donna Tartt and her editor Michael Pietsch talk through the experience of editing her latest novel from both sides of the red pen. It’s a fascinating insight into the near-magical possibilities of good editing—and what separates it from bad editing. For example, here’s this from Tartt: There’s […]
...more“Typos on the Internet”
Once you train yourself to spot errors, you can’t not spot them….You notice typos in novels, missing words in other magazines, incorrect punctuation on billboards. You have nightmares that your oversight turned Mayor Bloomberg into a “pubic” figure. For The Awl, Lori Fradkin writes about the trials and tribulations of the copyeditor. (She uses “copy […]
...moreEmotionally Grammatical
Yuka Igarashi of Granta wrote an introspective piece on the trappings and fussiness of copyediting. The presence of the unedited, the wrongfully edited, and the misspelled can be infuriating to an editor. Igarashi discusses her fight against the urge to edit beyond the office and scrutinize the grammar of her surroundings. I felt enormous fellow […]
...moreCopy Editors Are Your Friends
Proper copy editing includes examining the focus, dredging the main point up from the tenth paragraph to make it more prominent. Proper copy editing addresses the language: rooting out cliches, substituting an ordinary term for jargon when it would serve the reader better, altering infelicitous wording. Proper copy editing prunes, deleting the irrelevant, tightening the […]
...moreCopyediting George Saunders
How delightful is this style sheet used by the editors of George Saunders’s forthcoming short-story collection? Highlights include the distinction between “pity whoop” (noun) and “pity-whoop” (verb), the hyphenation of “pre-boner,” and how to put “Darkenfloxx” in the past tense.
...more