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Copy Editing: 5 Reasons Why It's ALWAYS Crucial

  

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Recently, I completed my work on a book for the development division of a major art museum. It had a late start and allowed little time for smoothing out the initial kinks. Nevertheless, the dedicated people involved in its preparation made it happen on time. Later, my client—not a development denizen but a publications person—told me that the principal way the development folks intended to reduce prep time and cost was to "skip the editing." After all, except for a brief introduction, all the words were in lists and the i.d. captions for the works of art. What was there to edit?

To avoid confusion, my sole subject in this post is copy editing. Developmental, substantive, and line editing, all of which should precede copy editing, usually entail more complicated procedures and almost always require more time. If the museum people were thinking in those terms, they were right to feel that the book did not need "editing."

Copy editing, however, really should be considered a bottom-line necessity for any publication, regardless of subject, nature, or content. It is ideally a phase unto itself and is brought into play to make sure that, at the very least, grammar, punctuation, and spelling are appropriate. (We're no longer supposed to refer to these elements of writing as being "correct." Ahem!) The copy editor also wields his fine-tooth-comb approach to assure that the project has an inherent consistency in spelling, usage, and style.

Using this museum book as an example, let's look at a few ways it benefited from copy editing:

1. Manuscript preparation: The original "manuscript" for the i.d. captions was a 75-meg spreadsheet generated by the museum's registrar. Its 11 columns included all the usual basic curatorial information for each of the 369 proposed works. My initial job was to convert selected columns for every piece into an editable word-processing form, then make sure that each caption conformed to the museum-mandated sequence and style.

2. Caption styling and editing: The resulting manuscript required careful examination to make sure that:

• artists' names conformed stylistically (e.g., full vs. popular name—Rembrandt Harmensz. van Rijn rather than just Rembrandt)
• titles of works of art were italicized
• media were handled uniformly
• dimensions were cited consistently (height x length x depth; inches before centimeters)
• donor credits conformed in spelling and style

Whenever I encountered a discrepancy or omission, I queried the registrar or the appropriate curator. Later, after the compilers had deleted more than 100 pieces and made significant revisions to the overall caption structure, it was crucial to rework, then review, every single entry to make certain that the new method had been put in place throughout.

3. Text massage: Of course, with just a 750-word introduction for prose, this seemed likely to be on the light side. Except that its isn't a writer, so my mission was to "adjust" the text to make it more concise and reader friendly as well as less repetitive, all the while maintaining the writer's voice. This brief piece was revised numerous times (including post-typesetting and during layout), and I needed to assure that the new text fit the book stylistically and physically after each iteration.

4. List management: The book's raison d'être is to honor many of the museum's donors. All museum books are apt to have a list of these folks somewhere, but usually it can be contained on the copyright page or in a paragraph or two in the acknowledgments. In the interest of keeping the field level, however, for this book each donor receives his/her/their own line (or two). Once laid out, 12 book pages were needed to include all 437 names. The list was strictly alphabetical, but careful scrutiny was needed to determine exactly which name was alphabetized. Would Mme de Stäel be listed with the D's or the S's? What about Janine Boschette and Paul Zimbalist—B or Z?

5. Project oversight: It's easily forgotten that copy editing needs to be an ongoing process that, once begun, continues throughout the book's production. A seemingly small change in chapter 3 could snowball into wholesale revision in chapter 8, and who but the copy editor will realize that? Authors are generally too close to their writing to catch such catalysts and their effects. For example, about two-thirds of the way through the museum project, the husband in a donor couple (who didn't share last names) died, and his wife requested a revision in their donor-list credit. I was instructed to make the change, but the requesters didn't realize that this should also change approximately seven individual i.d. captions as well.

Fortunately, the publications department was successful in convincing the book's originators to hire a copy editor at the outset.