In Pursuit of Perfection

When I was in college, I was obsessed with the idea of writing the perfect term paper. I didn’t have this as a conscious goal, but I spent hours rereading and revising my papers, to the point that it actually became a bit of a handicap. I would reread papers sometimes as many as fifty times, tweaking a not-so-perfect but still perfectly fine paper and ignoring other tasks piling up all around me.

After finally hearing the maxims “Perfect is the enemy of good” and “Perfect is the enemy of done,” I started to reevaluate my approach to writing and revision. I still probably reread, revised, tweaked, and tinkered with my essays after writing more than your average person, but I got a lot better at time management after I stopped doing dozens of passes on each one and without any drop in quality of my work.

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“Words, Words, Words”: The Importance of Stylesheets

I have a couple of different shirts that bill me as a booktrovert that I always get compliments on when I wear them. Recently, I was wearing one of them, and someone asked me if it was a real word in the dictionary. I wasn’t in the position to verify immediately but answered, “Probably not.”

It struck me at the time that it is a great example of how editors handle words that an author may have invented or that is common slang that hasn’t made its way to the dictionary yet, and those are some of my favorite projects to work on as an editor. They’re fun precisely because they aren’t in the dictionary! But that doesn’t mean there still isn’t a process for deciding the best way to format them. So, in the same way, I walked you through the debate on Kyiv and Kiev a couple of months ago, I will walk you through how I handle words like booktrovert as an editor.

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What’s In a Name?

Last week, I noticed that the AP Stylebook posted on social media that they use Chernobyl versus Chornobyl, though they acknowledge they will note the Chornobyl spelling as needed, which touched off quite a debate in the comments.

I am not an AP Stylebook user—as a book editor, the Chicago Manual of Style is my master—but I followed this discussion with considerable interest because this is exactly the kind of information that editors flag all the time in manuscripts.

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In Your Writing, Think Evergreen

One of my most important takeaways from working for a publisher was the importance of thinking evergreen. When marketers talk about evergreen content, they’re talking about content that has enduring power and isn’t just connected to a trend or fad. But when I say to think evergreen as a writer, what I’m talking about is not immediately dating your manuscript.

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“What Is Editing?”–Line Editing and Copyediting

Last time, we talked about higher-order concerns—all those big-picture aspects of a manuscript, such as organization, theme, argumentation—but this time we’re looking at the editing services that address lower-order concerns. Essentially, these are any and all sentence-level issues: style, grammar, punctuation, spelling, etc.

As I mentioned in my last post, when I worked at a college writing center, most of our student clients were far more interested in getting feedback on lower-order concerns than higher-order concerns, so we often had to guide them toward seeing the value in talking about things other than commas. We certainly talked about rogue commas, too, but not at the expense of larger issues in their papers.

I’ve not personally encountered this issue as an editor. Most of the authors I work with are well aware of how valuable it is to receive feedback on both higher-order and lower-order concerns and don’t need to be convinced of the merits of either one. They’re more likely to be unsure of exactly what each service entails and when they need it.

It can be a little overwhelming to wade through, so this post is going to talk about the two most common ways editors address lower-order concerns in manuscripts—line editing and copyediting.

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