Electronic feedback
I’ve recently had a script back from a copy-editor. It was
due 29 September and I finally got it the first week of November. More and more
publishers are now using Track Changes on Word documents and it can seem a bit
like being at school and getting back work covered in red ink. It’s easy to
think your work must be terrible. It isn’t. Otherwise the publisher wouldn’t have
accepted it. Your copy editor is good.
It’s very tempting to “accept all” and be done but that isn’t
a good option.
Copy-editors are not infallible
This one was pretty good, actually, and made a lot of helpful
suggestions. Typos were corrected. My script was aligned with the publisher’s
house-style. There were actually just one or two changes I didn’t agree with so
I rejected those. And this copy-editor did make one mistake: she misinterpreted
an indirect thought as a direct thought. Eventually I also noticed a couple of
things she had missed. So, it is a good job I painstakingly moved to every
change and either accepted it or rejected it. This usually means accepting two
changes at a time – often a deletion then an insertion.
More than a proof
read
A copy edit is more than just correcting blatant mistakes. The
copy-editor also advises about bits that aren’t working, checks for consistency
in content and form and spots stylistic awkwardness, including, for example, the
over-use of certain expressions.
How I worked with this
particular editor
I kept “Track Changes” on all the time, so that I could see where
I made extra changes.
First of all, I went through every change and either accepted
or rejected it. I probably accepted 99.9% of them.
Then I looked at the comments in the margin and responded to
them. This produced new text that I had to copy edit myself. Sometimes, though,
the comment related to a change I’d already accepted.
I revisited my own corrections and accepted them.
I rechecked my new work.
I kept revisiting chapters where I’d made changes until I’d
no corrections left.
All of this took about three weeks. Finally I sent back a
script that was much stronger than the original because both a copy-editor and
I had worked hard on it.
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