A Coding Issue

From the mindset of, I should be posting here, and I write enough stuff in emails that would be suitable content.

This question has been keeping me awake at nights for years: In a prose extract that includes 2nd and more paragraphs, would you/the compositor want a tab on the subsequent paragraphs? I forget which press I've worked for recently that said "no tabs in the manuscript." Didn't know if the compositors' codes/styles accounted for same.

Changing My Mind

I'd posted this back in spring 2020.

Newsroom quandary: Should ‘black’ be capitalized?
No.
You're welcome.

Am I allowed to change my mind? I have. Black, Brown, White, Blue, I presume (police).

Mid-manuscript revelation at some point.

And I'm coming back here. I think.

How to Explain Capitalization Choices to Your Family

The notion expressed in the title might seem silly, except for the fact that my son and daughter-in-law are high school English teachers. Well, and consider the fact that my sons, certainly the one who has become a teacher, never came to me for a writing or editing question. My god, the only thing in life I can actually help them with . . .

The only pieces of writing I've seen of my younger son's were a paper or two my wife liberated from his apartment one time while staying there when he and our future D-I-L were out of town. The reports that always came from his teachers were that they wished he wrote more. He presented his ideas with such economy of language that, while answering the questions, his assignments rarely approached the word limit. Could be worse problems.

So, while walking down the streets of Denver, my daughter-in-law mentioned that she and a student were having trouble deciding on capitalization of a certain term or category of terms. I tried to explain not only the proper approach (AP and Chicago agree) but that they really didn't have to puzzle this crap out for themselves. While Grammar Girl is pretty neat, so's your old man, so to speak.

As are these resources. The list is cribbed from the AP Stylebook. Thanks in advance to AP, which has not granted permission to reprint, but which has also of late realized the value of the serial comma. Mirabile dictu.

+++

AP Stylebook editors refer to the following resources to help guide style decisions. If you do not find your answer in the Stylebook, try checking one of these other sources. You can buy them for yourself using the links below.

First reference for spelling, style, usage and foreign geographic names:

Webster's New World College Dictionary, Fifth Edition

Other references for spelling, style, usage and foreign geographic names:

American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, Fifth Edition

Concise Oxford English Dictionary: Main edition 12th edition by Oxford Dictionaries (2011) Hardcover

Webster's Third New International Dictionary of the English Language

National Geographic Atlas of the World, Tenth Edition

The Elements of Style, Fourth Edition

The Chicago Manual of Style, 17th Edition

For aircraft names:

IHS Jane's All the World's Aircraft 2014-2015: Development & Production

For military ships:

Jane's Fighting Ships 2016/2017: Yearbook

For nonmilitary ships:

LLOYDS REGISTER OF SHIPS 1989-90 (3 VOLS A-G/H-O/P-Z)

For railroads:

The Official Railway Guide: Freight Service Edition,The Bulk Connection March/April 1990

For federal government questions:

Congress At Your Fingertips 115th Congress 1st Session 2017

For non-U.S. government questions:

Political Handbook of the World

The CIA World Factbook 2017

For religion questions:

Handbook of Denominations in the United States 13th Edition

Other references and writing guides consulted in the preparation of the AP Stylebook:

The Careful Writer

More Language That Needs Watching

Watch Your Language: a Lively, Informal Guide to Better Writing Emanating from the News Room of the New York Times

THE WORD: An Associated Press Guide To Good News Writing

Modern American Usage: A Guide

A Dictionary of Modern English Usage, Second Edition

Fowler's Dictionary of Modern English Usage

Harper Dictionary of Contemporary Usage

Newton's Telecom Dictionary

Dictionary of Problem Words and Expressions

Words into Type

A Nice Note from a Not-Easy-to-Please Book Designer

Thanks for the great work. Hopefully your client-base will recognize these efforts. This organization distinguishes you from the garden-variety "book reader" wannabe editors.

The "organization" to which he's referring is the use of XML style sheets. Easy to do, and book designers / typesetters love it when it's done right. It's the ever-so-rare equivalent of, as a copyeditor, getting a writer who actually knows how to punctuate. Makes life easier and projects go much more quickly.

That these labors were expended on a self-published romance novel . . . well, underlying my long-standing corporate motto, the check deposits just the same.

Why Even Bother? Style Sheet Wars

Contra many earlier posts, I'm becoming a fan of style sheets -- good ones, that is. I've actually even created a few lately.

What I don't like, but which seems increasingly common, are copyeditors who, presumably from force of habit, start off a style sheet saying that they've followed Chicago 16 and Merriam-Webster's 11th Collegiate, but the words listed on the style sheet and the text itself show little desire to actually enforce what those two volumes suggest.

Ugh.

==

On the eye front, had the last exam yesterday, except for the six-month follow-up. Received a new prescription and went straight to the local mall optical store. For the first time in my life, I had glasses made in one hour.

Not enough of a treat?

Once the glasses were made and slapped on my face, the gent handed me a little card to read. At about an arm's distance, I read the bottom lines on the page.

He said, "That's 20/15."

Of course, anything less than arm's length, I'm still a little fuzzy -- not that I'm complaining. He did say that my vision might still improve a little more as everything begins to come together.

What's hard -- almost painful -- is bright sunshine. The ophthalmologist said that's not surprising once the cataracts are gone. It's like walking out of a dark closet. Just need time to adjust.

Anyway, back to work.

Words I’d Change in the Dictionary

Merriam-Webster's editorial board: Are you listening?

health care: I’ve been uselessly enforcing this one for too long. One word. Let’s get it over with. 

record keeping: No way should this be two words. I could handle record-keeping. Even better: recordkeeping. See also child rearing; decision making; etc.

work site: already in the dictionary: workbag, workbasket, workboat, workbook, workbox, workday, workforce

            but work camp, work farm. OK, so I see the pattern, but I don’t see that it makes sense.

There are others. Many, many more.

Yours?

Danny boy

BSL 101: British as a Second Language

A book had been lurking on my schedule for months. Author told me about it last fall and sent me a draft in November to begin working on it. A few weeks later came a replacement chapter, then another. Thankfully I hadn’t begun working on the original yet, but I requested that when the entire manuscript was set, that’s when I should receive a complete new version. Author agreed.

Then the author said, I believe, one of the other chapters was undergoing heavy revision, or there was a new chapter or something, so everything’s on hold. OK.

Revised manuscript comes in February, followed by an email that some of the documentation needs to be reworked, and here’s what needs to be done. I wrote back and said, again, when you have a complete, finished manuscript, please send it to me. My point was not to be a jerk, and I explained that to the author. I’m not the one closest to the material. I’m not the subject expert. It’s not up to me to make substantive decisions about what’s in or not in the books.

About five hours later, the author sends me the completed manuscript, which I’ve now returned to the author, edited and tidied up. Great book, author is very pleasant. All’s good, although I do have one concern. Author said that the publisher’s deadline for the manuscript is August. I have a feeling the copyedited manuscript will not reside unmolested until then; rather, I fear that the author is going, by way of fact checking, to show this manuscript to a bunch of potential buyers of the book and tweak it for the next five months.

So, of course, down the line, some poor sap of a proofreader might be seeing When Versions Collide.

Oh. That would be me. Happy days.

The author is publishing the book with a UK press, so when the original manuscript came in last November, I had Colleen (dba interngirl) go through their 20-page style sheet and try to highlight all the differences from Chicago and any weirdness that didn’t look Amerkun. She marked plenty.

All her work was mostly for naught as I needed to refresh myself on all of it five months later anyway (formatting, a lot of things), but the press’s style sheet did spell out for me some things about British English that had baffled me. I’m not sure it does any less now.

Full point after abbreviation only where last letter of word omitted: Dr, Mr but etc., Prof., but not after contractions or in acronyms: Dr, St, Mr, BBC, UNESCO, USA. Note especially: ed. / eds, vol. / vols, Ch. / Chs, but the exception: no. nos.

Let that roll around in your head for a minute.

I’d always wondered why I would see “ed.” but “eds” in bibliographies when dealing with British works. Now I know. I probably miscorrected it in some volumes years ago. Live and learn. But to me, that’s too much to think about. Just put a damn full stop at the end of the abbreviation.

Include ‘e’ in forms such as: ageing, judgement, likeable.

> Use –ize and –ization; recognize, criticize; but use analyse, paralyse, electrolyse. Note that a number of verbs have no alternative to the ‘ise’ spelling, including: advertise, advise, circumcise, compromise, despise, devise, enterprise, exercise, franchise, improvise, revise, surmise, supervise, televise.

What the British taketh away in punctuation, they add back in unnecessary letters. I’ve never liked “judgement,” and of course. “acknowledgements” is the bane of editors and proofreaders everywhere in the United States. I don’t know what’s up with Use –ize and –ization. Nor do I understand the -lyse exception, which they don’t identify as such. In the book, I ran across other -lyse words. Do they fall under this rule? Could be argued either way.

Ellipses: … No space between points; space after only if leading to new sentence, no extra point if at end of sentence.

OK, class. Think about this one. Not only are the butt-ugly “points” (wait, here they’re not full points?) set tight, but no space around them, unless the following bit of copy is a sentence. Let me demonstrate:

The umpire was hot...and tired.

The umpire was hot, tired... He threw the manager out of the game for dropping the M-bomb.

I actually grew to like this style in the course of copyediting the book. Not saying I’d want to change to it, but it is efficient.

The ellipses, that is. Not the umpiring.

Round brackets should be used within round brackets where necessary. Square brackets should normally be confined to editorial comment.

By this point, I’m enraged. It’s like, “What the hell have you people done to our language?” I want to go into a Sam Kinison rant, “Have you ever heard the word ‘parentheses,’ people? What the hell is a ‘round bracket’?” So, in this book we have some parenthetical — I guess that would be round-bracketal — in-text citations that read “(blah blah blah (Smith and Jones 2000)).” Joyous.

Use minimum numbers for number spans except in ‘teens’, e.g. 25–8, 136–42, 150–1, but 12–16.

Whatever.

Formatting:

En Rules (and Em Rules)

> An en rule is longer than a hyphen and is used to replace ‘to’ in number spans, e.g. ‘24–8’. As there is no en rule key on the standard keyboard you should indicate en rules between numbers using the normal short hyphen.

> The en rule is also used to link two items of equal weight, e.g. ‘Nazi–Soviet pact’. To indicate words which should be linked with en rules (rather than normal hyphens) type a double hyphen, e.g. Nazi--Soviet pact.

> Spaced en rules are used as parenthetical dashes or pauses. Type a single hyphen with a space before and after to indicate a dash.

> Only use em (—) rules to indicate a deliberately obscured word.

So, em dashes don’t appear. An em dash is for their purposes an en dash with spaces around it. In the bibliography, instead of the 3-em dash for a repeated author, they use an en dash.

And what everyone wants to know:

> If following UK style, always use single quotation marks for dialogue and quoted material in the text. Reserve the use of double quotation marks for quotes within quotes, e.g. ‘Edward found the trappings of “royalty” hung heavily.’

> In UK style the full stop only falls inside the quotation mark if the material quoted is a complete sentence, e.g. He called it “my house”, even though it belonged to Clara.

Now, I think I get it. But why oh why did they use double quotes in the last example, and why did they refer to a “full stop” when a comma appears? Is a comma also a “full stop”?

I’m going to have to relearn all this stuff again at some point. I think I’ll see this book again even before it goes to the publisher. Just a guess.

Guidelines Minutiae

Indexing

I worked on an index recently that is destined for a university press consortium that is new to LandonDemand. The consortium represents five universities in a part of the country known for its excellent higher education. I will leave it at that.

The press offered an interesting detail about how it wants its final indexes to appear.

> Use subentries only for entries that have more than eight or ten page numbers. As far as possible, make sure that each subentry has multiple page numbers rather than a single page number.

That guideline would take some getting used to, although I'd do well to heed its advice. The level of detail in my indexes would be diminished, and I'd likely spend less time in composing them. Having done something a certain way for years, the shift would require an adjustment in my work practices. I can think of a few of my clients who probably wouldn't be wild about the change in approach, but maybe I've been overdelivering for too long. Speaking a few weeks ago with the freelancer who kind of inspired me into this business and finding out that she's charging about 33 percent more for her indexes than I am makes me think I could stand to pull out fewer hairs over this tedious task.

Copyediting

From the style sheet of one of the clients I rehabilitated earlier this year:

> Do hyphenate all participle-terminated prenominal compound adjectives (e.g., “participle-terminated” in this sentence).
> Do hyphenate predicative compound adjectives that are participle-terminated (e.g., “participle-terminated” in this sentence).
> Do not treat noun-adjective compound adjectives in general in the same way as participle-terminated ones.
> Do not hyphenate compound adjectives consisting of noun modifying noun (e.g., “water quality analysis”).
> Use an en dash in compound adjectives consisting of two joined nouns or parallel adjectives (e.g., “Thai–Cambodian border”).
> Do not hyphenate adverbially modified compound adjectives (such as “adverbially modified” in this sentence) even if the adverb does not end in -ly.

I admit freely that except for the line about the en dashes, I had to read the above about four times before I understood what the hell was going on. Not to pull the curtain back on the Wizard or anything, but I am not Mr. Grammar, which might be a surprising admission for copyeditor. (And to those folks who think the SAT is a predictor of future career success, if that's the case, I'd be an engineer today instead of an editor.) I know proper grammar, but I can't explain it. I can't tell you what all the different tense variations are or the names for anything other than the essential parts of speech, but I guess if my client list is any indication, I do a fair job out of making sense out of the whole deal.

Without any doubt, the person in my work career who could throw around all the names of tenses and parts of speech with the greatest facility was one of the worst editors--and certainly the worst manager--I have ever encountered.

====

On an unrelated note, some ignant author stories are lurking, but I need a little more distance between job completion and talking out of school before I write anything about them.

My Favorite Epigraph

Take time to familiarize yourself with this manual. The slightest deviation from the style described herein will lead directly to the collapse of our carefully constructed editorial house of cards, economic upheaval, spiritual and moral chaos, and the end of civilization as we know it.

—APWA Style Guide, 2nd ed., American Public Welfare Association, 1995

Comfort? I don't want no stinking comfort

You know, as much as I've railed against them on this blog, style manuals are one place in my life where I desire heavy doses of totalitarianism. Tell me what to do, so when I'm pestered about it, I can blame it on someone else.

I was wondering about the possessive of "corps" -- corps's? corps'? -- and was directed to CMOS 7.21, where they give their rule, such as it is, and then go on to say, "Opt for this practice only if you are comfortable with it and are certain that the s is indeed unpronounced." (By the way, no 's' after the apostrophe when the 's' at the end of the root word is unpronounced.)

What is this "only if you are comfortable with it" jive? What the hell does my comfort level have to do with anything? Isn't that the whole point of style guides, to give me some standard to go by, even if it makes me uncomfortable as hell? If all I needed to rely on was my own comfort, publishers throughout our fair nation would be in a world of hurt. Multiply that by the comfort of all the other freelancers out there, and you'd have anarchy. Anarchy, I tell you.

Proofreading and Editing Style Sheets

There's a little widget off to the right-hand side of this blog from a company called Feedjit. It allows me (and perhaps you, I don't know) to look at where people come to this blog from and what brings them here. I don't know specifically who is checking in, but I can see that I get a lot of repeat viewers from some towns, and I can also see what terms they were searching that might have led them here for the first time.

Deep down, I have mixed feelings about this little gadget. On some level, I wonder if I am part of the move toward invasion of privacy (Moi, give me a gut-check here. What do you think?) in that I'm monitoring people's actions in cyberspace. On the other hand, this is my little piece of real estate -- actually designed as a marketing tool for my services -- so to the extent that it might help me draw more people to an awareness of my services, I should mine it for what it's worth. Hence, the title of this blog entry, which I might get around to eventually.

A favorite story of mine is a guy who moved to a small town and wanted to establish himself as a regular at the local diner. So he goes into the diner every day for six months, sits at the counter in front of the same waitress, and orders the same thing. Every day. Six months.

Finally he gets up the nerve to test whether he's established himself as one of the locals. He sits down at the counter and, screwing up all his courage, tells the waitress, "I'll have the usual."

She says, "You mean the regular."

He says, "OK. The regular."

And she responds, "Fine. In your case, what would that be?"

As my kids would say, "Pwned." (If you don't know any teenagers or gamers, you'll have to look that one up.)

I used to guard against this, because private individual that I wanted to be, I would go into restaurants where I was indeed a regular, or a usual, and intentionally order something against type once in a while just not to be so predictable. This was especially the case in Atlanta when I was single and tended to frequent the same places to eat . . . where the waitrons would think they'd know my order, and I'd ask for something else.

(Why are people so weird? More to the point, why am I?)

So, I'm looking at feedjit, and there appears to be more interest in style sheets; that is to say, people often find my site looking for information on style sheets. And I've made my point in a number of posts on this blog what I think about style sheets: that they are largely a worthless endeavor because most typically they either (1) repeat what is already in Chicago or Merriam-Webster's, (2) are rarely accurate because the people who create them often don't bother to follow through on what they are trying to standardize, or (3) seem to be a way for copyeditors to show off how meticulous they can be. As a proofreader, do I really want a 15-page, 2-column list of every proper noun in the book? Do I have time to check every proper noun I read against this list? As a copyeditor, do I have time to compile this list? For proper nouns as a copyeditor, presuming I receive an electronic copy of the manuscript, I can create a custom dictionary that will capture these names, but stopping as I'm editing a book and writing them down or keying them in? Hell, that's hard work.

And it would be nice to think that one could trust authors to get their own information right, but, well, they are authors -- the banes of the publishing industry. When you work regularly with PhDs who don't seem to know how to compose a footnote, let's just say that skepticism comes easy.

If you've happened upon this blog looking for information, and you're not finding what you want to read, send me an email, or post a comment, and I guarantee I will respond to you. Guarantee.

One of the reasons I started this blog was to demystify the process of what I do. An accountant friend of mine once said that I should have been a CPA, because my greatest skill is the ability to stick with incredibly boring materials for a long period of time. And he might be right. There are editors out there who know more about grammar than I do, and who can improve people's writing better than I can, and who might actually have some knowledge about what they are reading. I wish them all the best. Can they do it day after day, night after night, year after year, oblivious to the content but focusing on the task, and hopefully maintain some sense of humor about it and not turn into prima donnas?




I've seen some freelance editing websites where it seemed like most of the people were intent on keeping all this stuff a secret, or not telling people their rates, or going to the mats over the difference between "complicated" and "complex." And I've seen people's websites where they list all their areas of expertise, but don't name a client and don't post a rate sheet. Not that what I'm doing here should be a model for everyone else. It's just my approach, for better or worse. Only a few of my clients I think have ever visited here, and actually I think they were prospective clients for whom I ended up doing a book or two. Probably the last thing my regular (usual) clients need to know is what's going on in my head. As I've said, the best verification I get for my work is repeat business and timely paychecks. And if you look at my client list on this blog, just about every one of those clients is an organization I've worked for in the last 18 months, and many of them are pretty steady. For one in particular, I probably work on about 30 titles a year, at least. Praise Dan, from whom many blessings flow.

So, back to the privacy issue. I'd love to know who some of these folks are who check in regularly. I know Moi, obviously, because you can see her comments and I know where she lives. But there are a few localities that I just wonder. I have some suspicions, and in the interest of keeping things private, I'm not going to call them out here.

If you are a regular visitor to this blog (you know who you are, even if I don't), thanks for checking in even if you don't post a comment or send me an email -- although I'd love to hear from you. And I really mean the following: if you are legitimately looking for answers to questions about copyediting or proofreading or indexing, get in touch with me via email or phone or whatever. It's to my benefit that the overall tide of freelance editors remains as high as possible, because it helps everyone and convinces people of the worthiness of this service if people are receiving quality editorial help for their money. And if you learn more or get some knowledge from me, you're not going to take away any of my business. There's enough business to go around -- for the people who are good at this and get their name out there.

There's one convention I go to every few years if it's close enough to where I live and I have a more or less free place to stay when I get there (yes, I'm cheap; the entrance fee to the convention is expensive enough). And when I get down to the convention display floor -- essentially for a few days the world's largest religious bookstore -- I am amazed and perturbed at how many of the exhibitors are not clients of mine. While I might be working for 15 or 20 of them, there are another 100 that have never heard of me and that are getting along quite well without me (and vice versa). But they're using someone. And that's just religious publishing. There are dozens of publishing fields out there that use freelancers like me. And if you happen to be a publisher of (I saw this category in some publishers' listing a few years ago) lesbian science fiction, hey, I can use a break now and then from reading yet another book about the baby Jesus. Give me a call.

copyediting and design

Sometimes my publishers will ask me for design input, and I defer by default. I am no designer. Don't ask about fonts, layout, spacing, and so on -- not because I don't have opinions, but I have no training as a designer. I've worked on literally (and depressingly) probably a thousand books or more in my freelance career, and I can tell you what I like or don't like, but I couldn't really tell you why. I can also tell you if pages are laid out consistently, or if your leading or spacing is off by some minuscule amount that most readers would not see, but don't ask me -- except for the basics -- what a page should look like.

Having said that, for a number of my publishers, part of my job as a copyeditor is to give the designer instructions on how to lay out a book. This is done typically through Word style sheets or a series of codes. Examples:

PN (part number)
PT (part title)
PST (part subtitle)
CN (chapter number)
CT (chapter title)
CST (chapter subtitle)
1 (1-level head)
2 (2-level head)
3 (3-level head)
4 (4-level head)
BL (bulleted list)
NL (numbered list)
UL (unnumbered list)
2C (two-column text)
FM (front matter)
BM (back matter)
BIB (bibliography)
PE (prose extract)
VE (verse extract)
BOX (I'll leave this one to you)

Such codes are highlighted, placed in square brackets or angle brackets . . . whatever will catch the designer's attention so that per can search for the codes and apply the proper typographical attributes to that section of text. Whatever is not coded is presumed to be body text.

One publisher in particular has a list of codes that goes way beyond this and gets down to specific characters, such as for an apostrophe at the beginning of a word (for an elided character) that if left uncoded would appear as a single opening quote.

Where am I going with all this? Because of this coding function, the copyeditor becomes a de facto designer -- not in terms of fonts and spacing and the overall look of the book -- but how certain text is to be treated.

For example, paragraphs that begin with numbers: should they be treated as numbered lists, or just as paragraphs that begin with numbers? What about chapter-ending questions in a book of curriculum? Should the header for that list of questions be treated as a 1-level head, or have some different typographical treatment? Should some copy that doesn't apply directly to the running text be treated as a box or as a prose extract (PE)? Should heads for front matter be treated as chapter titles?

These are not life-or-death decisions. Ultimately a page designer is going to work with the in-house editor to determine what looks best. But the first pass at book design is often made by the copyeditor, especially when a publisher does not simply work off a series of templates for all of its books. Even then, deciding what code to apply to a given portion of text can be a conundrum.

This message brought to you by the Editors-Trying-to-Avoid-Real-Work Committee at the Land on Demand Intergalactic Corporate HQ.

Fault is all mine

Sometimes I'm just too smart for my own good.

I'm working on this nutbuster of an editing job. Very difficult subject matter and a complex manuscript, but at least it's not an index. The writing is fine, but the manuscript is about one-third notes and bibliography. Out of a 450-page m/s, 300 pages are text; the rest is documentation. Yuck.

So it's taking me forever to plow through this thing because of having to stop and check the notes and check them against the bibliography, and the days are ticking away . . . days when I should be moving on to something else.

Bright idea: just read the text, then go back and do the notes and bibliography.

This particular publisher, which seems only to send me nearly impossible projects (I'm getting tired of it), has given me a new press style sheet for each of the last three jobs. This is also an incredible pain, because minor things change from one to the next . . . not that I can keep up with the style desires of my stable of publishers anyway, but eventually when I'm into a project I remember the quirks. Called out for particular importance on this new style sheet is that it's very important that scriptural citations match the NRSV, because the publisher has a rights arrangement with them . . . unless the author explains otherwise or cites the different translation.

OK. Fine. So in the chapter where I decide to forgo the notes, all of a sudden there are many more scriptural citations than before. So I dutifully begin checking against NRSV, and probably spend three hours making changes word-by-word, changes that really don't matter much to the translation and that have no effect on the subsequent narrative. This is nothing new. Authors often use a translation that the press doesn't want used, and it falls to the copyeditor to make the changes.

So, what's the problem? I finish the text quickly, then turn to the notes. Note number 16: "Biblical translations are the author's," which means he's gone back to the Greek and Hebrew and done his own translation, which is perfectly legit and doesn't need to be altered.

I've wasted three hours changing the text, and then I spent literally an hour and a half with a Pink Pearl eraser removing my acres of pencil markings.

Who do I blame for all this? Who else can I blame? All my fault. How could I have avoided this? I should have checked the note accompanying the first biblical excerpt to see if there was an explanation. Woulda shoulda coulda. You can add to "editor indexer proofreader" occasional dumbass.

And now I'm so tired of the project that it's hard to get back to it. I've got about 60 pages of notes and the accompanying 30 pages of bibliography to go through, and then some searches that won't take long, but the notes and bibliography itself I'll be lucky if I can get through at 5 pages an hour. In my business and with my self-imposed demands, not only is that frustrating, but it's essentially a money-losing proposition.

But it's gotta get done. I suspect I have some clients who are wondering why the last year seems to have degenerated into one creative excuse after another. While they keep coming back, it's beginning to wear on me a little. Although the folks on the receiving end, I feel, probably operate somewhat the same way I do. If they want something back from me on x date, they probably get around to it on x date plus 3 days. But their job is to keep things moving, as is mine. That's the theory anyway.

And when things don't move quickly enough, I tend to get testy.

Some days . . . I'd really like to chuck it all. As much theology as I read, I don't really have a theology of my own. But in some vague way, I don't think this life is all there is . . . so the fact that I've given up some hope on much changing about the way I operate in this go-round is mitigated by the fact that things might be different if and when I'm given another chance. But this is all a topic for a different blog: the antitheology of the theology editor. I was once asked by a pastor friend of mine what type of immunity I had that I could read this stuff day after day, year after year, and it didn't affect me -- that is, cause me to become religious, specifically Christian. I used to say that I could accept the New Testament, but I'd have to first accept the Old Testament. Now, quite frankly, it's one of the topics that really doesn't matter to me whatsoever. A friend a few weeks back recommended prayer to me . . . a specific type of prayer done at a specific time. I took him up on it for a few weeks. Ended up doubled over in pain and panic. Not that there's a cause and effect, but maybe it's just another thing that I managed to screw up.

Damn. If you've gotten here, you deserve a prize. So, here you go. I'd like to be able to dance like this guy for just one second. My dancing style makes Al Gore look loosey-goosey.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ib2b4BOZIQ

Inside baseball

I recently had the following exchange with a typesetter/designer with whom I have worked for years. He asked me:

Has the advent of Kindle or .mobi had a significant impact on the way you do your work?
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My response:

Zero. But I'm always interested in what you guys have going on.
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He writes back, quoting back to me an email I’d sent him a few months ago:

I think this has something do with the way your job has changed:

“Among the presses I work for, Templeton Foundation has me impose Word's style sheets for coding. University of Tennessee: the style sheets are already assigned when I get the files to work on. University of Georgia: they have a very extensive angle-brackets coding system that's probably got about 20-30 different codes, even for individual characters like apostrophes that open words, such as 'em (for "them") = em. Health Communications has me do angle bracket coding, as do Orbis and Chapel Hill Press (although I'm trying to get their typesetters to try the style sheets). Westminster John Knox and Baylor Univ. Press have me write in the codes on the manuscript, and someone back on their end or the typesetter follows them or keys them in when the changes are made.

“When I get a manuscript that's been designed in Word (as most often happens with XXX), I'll immediately strip out all the crap, turn it all into body text, and then add the codes while editing. As far as I know, the only press of mine that might actually send designed Word files to the printer (and they look every bit as horrid as you might imagine) is YYY. I think they've got some old guy there (named Mr. ZZZ, actually), who refuses to change his ways and they can't get rid of him. Occasionally, I think the director of the press actually does some design himself just to get around Mr. ZZZ's quirks.”

I'm trying to bring people like Mr. ZZZ (no pun) into an understanding of what is going on, although it really is nothing new--consider it a renaissance if you like (cite "CMOS Vol. 14, p. 63, 2.56"). Maybe those who went before us will stop turning in their graves.
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My response:

There's no doubt that my job has changed over the years. You asked me if Kindle or .mobi has had any significant impact on the way I work. I gave you the answer as best as I knew how. Not one of my clients has ever mentioned Kindle or .mobi to me, so the presumptive answer, which I stand by, is "zero." I had never heard of .mobi until your email.

What the presses do with my work when it gets back to them is not my concern, as long as they keep using me and whatever I'm doing makes them happy. They could be putting this stuff out on stone tablets for all I care, as long as it served their market and kept them, and thus me, in business.
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He comes back with:

The purpose of the coding that you are involved in is to accommodate cross-format technology. That has driven the change you mentioned. .html, .mobi and .azw have impacted your and other's work including mine and--coming soon to an editor near you--coding TOC's and indexes prior to pagination to accommodate linkages cross-format will be a norm.
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And my last two cents:

1. I feel like the lumberjack who is cutting down a tree. It doesn't matter to me if that tree ultimately becomes a pencil or a fine piece of furniture. But if the person paying me to wield the chainsaw wants me to cut the tree in a different way, I'm happy to do so.

2. Coding indexes prior to pagination -- ehh, not so much. Maybe for a concordance, but not for a true index. It would take a long time for me to switch over from reading laid-out pages to working within coded documents to compose a true index. Indexing is way more than just identifying strings of words and attaching codes to them. I hope that everyone remembers that.
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Now, class, why did I post this? Discuss among yourselves.

style sheets: lord, deliver me

I received a call today from Book Packager A working with Book Packager B, who had sent me a job for copyediting and indexing. Book Packager A ended up farming out the proofreading work to another individual. No problem there.

A asks me if I had developed a style sheet for the book that the proofreader could use. I responded that I follow Chicago 15 and Merriam Webster's 11th Collegiate.

In some cases, copyeditors and/or in-house editors will develop a style sheet for a particular book. A publisher may develop a style manual for the press, or a magazine will do the same. The style sheet indicates decisions made by the editor to indicate particular word usages employed in the editing of that particular book. The purpose is to ensure editorial consistency.

My opinion, shared by many who actually labor in the fields, is that style sheets are often as worthless as, as they say, tits on a bishop (well, maybe in these days and times, such a reference no longer holds true, for many reasons).

Style sheets serve no purpose if all they do is echo other accepted reference works, such as Chicago 15 or MW 11. There is no reason for me to keep a list of word treatments that one can find spelled correctly in a dictionary.

Another thing: when I'm proofreading a book and I receive a style sheet, as often as not, the copyeditor has not followed through on the decisions that he or she (or per) has made, which simply leads to confusion.

After telling Book Packager A in three or four different ways that, indeed, there was no style sheet and explaining why, I began to feel that the call was a waste of my time. I grew less apologetic as each minute passed.

Somewhat exasperated, my caller tried another tack: "What about the medical and scientific terms? Certainly you kept a list of those?"

"Nope."

Silence.

"I checked the terms that needed checking and ensured they were correct and treated them consistently through the manuscript. That's all I can say. I don't generally keep style sheets for all the reasons I have mentioned."

A lazy person's style sheet, and actually quite a functional one--especially for proper names, foreign words, and words that might be particular to a specific field--can be presented in the form of a custom dictionary created from a spell check. One rather enlightened publisher I work for requires that I submit a custom dictionary with any electronically copyedited manuscript. Custom dictionaries are wonderful for uncovering inconsistencies in spellings.

And style manuals from publishers are also typically losing propositions. As a friend said today, they are often created by a staff editor who feels that "We need a style manual," so everyone puts a lot of effort into it, only to have it slowly grow dated, not followed by working editors, or not supported over the years.

Probably the best style manual to which I have access from a publisher is that of Westminster John Knox, because it's comprehensive, and the in-house editors enforce it.

And a great style manual if you're interested in the Bible or classical works is the Society of Biblical Literature's, which I originally did not care for, but it's grown on me over the years.

But style sheets for individual books that merely duplicate available sources? Unnecessary. Not worth the time. And often not helpful at all.

My two cents.