Weekend Discussion: Is Copy Editing Extinct?
May 25, 2007 by Deb
Filed under Freelance Writing
Is Copy Editing Extinct
Is copy editing extinct?
I’m a writer, and when it comes to copy editing, I’ve never been anything more than adequate. And I know I’m barely even that when the words I’m trying to edit are my own rather than some other writer’s.
I started out as a technical writer for academic books and journals, heavily insulated from the reality of publication by a phalanx of copy editors, fact checkers, and proofreaders. I went on to work as a reporter at newspapers, and then as a editor for newsletters and magazines. All along the way, I worked with some of the best copy editors in the business.
I’d go over a story two or three times, think it was polished, and then have it come back from the copy editor with a dozen small but very real inconsistencies neatly queried or corrected. And occasionally the copy editor spotted a real whopper of a mistake involving a place name or technical term.
These glitches had gotten by me because my eye and my brain were focused at some other level of the text. Did the quote I’d selected accurately represent the person quoted? Was the lede as sharp as possible? Did the story flow at a good pace? And they’d gotten by me because I’m a writer, thinking about writing, and publications have copy editors who think about copy editing. At least they used to.
In recent years, I’ve been working as a marketing writer for websites. It’s a different universe. For the best of those sites, people review my copy to make sure it’s logical, accurate, grammatical, and free of obvious spelling errors. For the worst of them, one harried web content producer glances over the copy to make sure it’s beem written in English with complete sentences. There’s never a copy editor. No one notices or cares if various writers working on the site use different styles for serial commas, hyphenation, or dashes. If errors are introduced in the final phase of the reviewing (such as extra words or missing words), the text goes live that way and stays that way, sometimes for weeks, until someone notices. As a rule, no one cares if the technical parts of the site (signup pages, error messages, and FAQs) are riddled with jargon, extra spaces between words, and non-standard punctuation.
Writing my own blog entries at 1 a.m. and getting ready to click the Publish button, I fantasize about a 24-hour on-call copy editor, some sort of “ghost in the machine” who could clean up my copy on a moment’s notice and who accepts Pay Pal payments. (The idea that software can take the place of a copy editor is, of course, laughable. At one publication, where they insisted I work with Microsoft Word, Word automatically grammar-checked my text and made substantive changes without alerting me. When I printed out the article I’d written about a local “grantmakers association,” I saw to my horror that Word had decided it was about the “grandmothers association.”)
Lack of copy editing in the world of web writing makes the “old school” writer in me completely crazy. I think of my demanding copy editing professor at journalism school, Irv Horowitz, who used to tell complaining students that he wanted us to learn the craft at its highest level. “You can always lower your standards later,” he’d growl.
Well, it’s later. And we have. Does anyone (except us) notice?
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In the bad old days (pre e-mail) I paid a proofreader/editor to look over my work bigger projects before sending them to my clients.
That disappeared when e-mail and “Internet” time telescoped the time I got to spend on most projects.
Today, I’m lucky if I have to the chance to let something sit overnight so I can look at it with a fresh pair of eyes.
Still, a copywriter is responsible for making sure what they deliver is correct in terms of spelling, grammar, etc.
Part of the gig.
The web has definitely made things faster, but sometimes not for the better. I try to proofread as best I can, but sometimes I’ve been faced with embarrassing errors. I’ve even read ebooks that cost $47 with terrible mistakes.
Oh, readers notice…sometimes. I know it grates on me when I see something that contained errors that should have been caught in editing, no matter where I see them. People make mistakes, sure; there’s no crime there. But, speaking for myself, it makes it hard to take an individual or company seriously if something that is intended to be professional contains errors, even little nitpicky ones. After all, if the medium isn’t worth attention, how valuable can the message be?
As a once and future copy editor, though, it’s part of my nature to be picky about such things. The sad thing about this seeming negligence toward editing is that it shows up in people who ought to know better. I just completed a master’s in creative writing, and the level of proofing I saw in my colleagues’ work over the last few years was disheartening (mind you, I’m not talking about simple mistakes, to which anyone can fall afoul, like I frequently do; I mean a systematic inattention to checking one’s work). It’s the whole medium/message question again. *sigh* Dyspepsia, here I come…
If a writer is going to write and expect to get anything published or even looked at, I’m sorry but they should already have (or at least be in the process of achieving) perfect grammar, spelling, punctuation, etc. skills.
To me, a “copy editor job” is made up baloney!
S
Great discussion! With regard to your last question, I find myself asking the broader question, “Does anyone (except us) even care?” With the vast quantity of published material available, especially with the ever-increasing popularity of the Internet, one can’t help but wonder who edits all this stuff. I’m not a professional writer (I blog from time to time), but I still cringe whenever I see glaring errors within the body of a published piece of writing. And when I use the term “glaring errors,” I don’t necessarily mean misplaced hyphens, inappropriate application of parentheses or inconsistent comma usage. It’s usually the seemingly basic things like using “it’s” instead of “its,” or failing to properly employ words like “their,” “they’re” and “there.” Those are the kinds of things that always derail my train of thought while reading an article on, say, dental floss. I might read the following sentence: “Excessive flossing has it’s setbacks.” I think most people wouldn’t even think twice about the error in that sentence, and would be completely content to just ignore it and move on to the part about gingivitis prevention. In fact, most people, who even notice this error, would quickly dismiss it and happily move on to the gingivitis part. Virtually no one would stop and say, “Hold on, here! I just can’t get past this, and now this person is talking about gingivitis, but I’m no longer engaged. Bugger!”
It’s no wonder that the purists (and I’m clearly not one of them) view the English language as having gone to hell in handbasket. Of course, the purists would argue that the literary world must, at all costs, be protected from split infinitives and sentence-ending prepositions. I can certainly understand this argument. After all, if, for instance, you allow a split infinitive to casually slide on through, who’s to say it won’t just stop there. Pretty soon, dangling modifiers will show up, thereby propelling what is now considered acceptable English into a state of chaos – kind of like the “Domino Theory” as it might pertain to the English language.
I couldn’t help but get a chuckle from what you said about Microsoft Word. Those poor grantwriters, especially the males. I mean, one day you’re a healthy, young, male grantwriter, and the next, you’ve aged countless years and have, in fact, become transgendered! You’re now a grandmother! And it’s all due to an unfortunate mishap involving Microsoft Word and its well-meaning, yet often-wrong auto-correct function! Well, at least you have an association to look to for support, right? And also, you now have several lovely grandchildren with whom to become acquainted – even if you have absolutely no clue as to their parents’ whereabouts. However, your career as a grantwriter is now over. I hope there’s a good retirement plan!
Anyway, thanks for the thought-provoking post, and also for the useful links.
Cheers!
Dave
The problem seems to be not only on the internet, but is flowing into our print newspapers as well. My local publication, The St. Petersburg Times, has won numerous awards over the years. It is a major daily publication, yet lately there have been glaring typos, grammer faux pas and numerous errors that make it seem as if no one even cares what goes to print anymore.
As for the internet, it may just be correct that no one cares. I do think that spelling and grammar are not taught as strictly in the schools in the U.S. anymore as it seems more and more high school graduates are unable to write a paper without glaring mis-spellings and grammatical nightmares.
I always care when I read articles online or in print that contain errors. I used to browse some of the better newspapers for errors before I got my first job as an editor. I basically see proofreading as a pre-editing job. It certainly helps improve the skills needed to edit more thoroughly.
I try to believe that I write well. However, I’ll admit that errors slip past my sight until much later. Having a proofreader can help save a writer from some minor embarrassment.
I don’t think you can say it’s going extinct, I think there’s just so much more content out there and we, as writers/editors, see glitches in it. At my old newspaper, there were these fossils at the copy desk–but they knew their stuff. I don’t think us younger workers even knew, or appreciated, English like they did.
I am a young copyeditor, and I care. I care partly because I notice and partly because I wish some of these sites would hire me to fix it. Knowing I could make it better if someone would only let me is really frustrating.
(Also, many modern style guides agree that straining at sentence-ending prepositions and split infinitives is pointless and out of date. I end sentences with prepositions and split infinitives all the time. It sounds better that way.)
Actually, there are 24-hour on-call copy editors who clean up copy on a moment’s notice and accept PayPal. You can email copy to them, even paste text into forms on their websites. I searched Google for “online copyediting” and found several.
I often wonder if anyone notices the proliferation of mistakes on the Web as well. As a (half-time) copyeditor, they immediately jump out at me, but I’d be the first to admit that when I get too close to my own work, mistakes occasionally slip through the cracks. Copyediting does seem to be an endangered profession yet it’s one that’s more needed than ever before. For the sake of my livelihood, I’m just glad some people still demand a “ghost in the machine.”
Sarah wrote:
If a writer is going to write and expect to get anything published or even looked at, I’m sorry but they should already have (or at least be in the process of achieving) perfect grammar, spelling, punctuation, etc. skills.
Here’s why copyediting is a job: copyeditors make your writing more concise and readable. Copyeditors make sure that your pronouns agree in number with the nouns they replace–in the sentence above, for example, “writer” is singular; “they” is plural. They add commas after introductory phrases (such as “I’m sorry, but…”). They catch sloppy or vague writing, such as the pointless use of “etc.”
Here’s how I, a former copyeditor, would have edited your sentence:
Writers who expect their work to be published need to have near-perfect grammar, spelling, and punctuation.
…because, of course, NOBODY, not even the best copyeditor, is perfect. And I’m sorry, but those who are “in the process of achieving” good grammar definitely need editing.
Fortunately, most of the comments here show that good writers understand why copyediting isn’t “baloney.”
Nice job, anonymous! I was going to point out that Sarah is no more perfect than anyone else, but you did it so much more nicely than I was planning!
In response to Courtney — most ebooks that cost $47 are crap by definition. My humble opinion, at any rate.
Anonymous – great editing job
I agree very much with Kristen and brinestone – there’s a lot of content out there and I’d like to be the one to fix it sometimes.
Copy editing is the the spit and polish on a finished piece. I can see why with the speed of things on the web that copy editing is not always done before a project or piece is published, but there is no reason once that immediacy is met that the work couldn’t be edited and corrected.
I recently helped an ornithologist edit the 2d volume of “The White-cheeked Geese…”, written mainly by Dr. Harold Hanson, and partly by himself, Dr. Bertin W. Anderson. Although there were several errors in the published volume, he has asked me to help again with his own version of white-cheeked geese.
He has had professional editing help before and so he knows the difference. My question is: does anyone have an opinion about taking an online course to improve my skills? I briefly looked at EEI Communications online but do not think this would work for me.
I have an A.B. in history, and an MLS.
Thank you,
Don Wendell