Actually, to be fair, I must say that when I am placed in the position of working with authors--for example, when they need to review copyedits or indexes--the exchanges are typically pleasant. One of the university presses I work for has me do the copyedits, send them to the author for review, and then the author sends them back to me before I ship off the final manuscript to the press. Every one of those authors has been delightful to work with. Kudos to you in the Classic City of the South (and if you want to know which press that is, do your research on this phrase).
Self-publishing authors are also nice, and typically grateful for the assistance.
One of my gigs is working on the scholarly journals that a university press handles. I received a job for proofreading last week, and part of the task is transferring the journal editor's comments to the master set of proofs, which will also include my own corrections.
First, this editor blamed an incorrect French-to-English translation on "a copy-editor." Not this one.
Then I come upon this delightful note:
Quotation marks instead of Italics, please. This is a left over change by one of your neophyte sub-editors, who actually thought I was mistakenly trying to use quotation marks for emphasis instead of italics!!
Neophyte sub-editor, indeed. That's the title for my next business card. I will own up to making that change, but not for the reason that this editor presumed. No need to go into the explanation, but suffice it to say that the tone of the comment makes me happy, again, that I mostly deal with managing editors--professionals who know what they are doing and who allow me to do what I do without experiencing the haughtiness of this type of riff-raff.
2 comments:
I'm getting that last image on a tee shirt.
Moi: You'd probably want it back and front to cover everyone who needed to see it.
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