It is impossible to self-edit. All writers need editors.
The role of ‘editor’ can vary from publication to
publication. The Editor-in-Chief of a daily newspaper performs a different role
from a textbook copy-editor, and again her job differs from the job of a magazine
‘sub’.
I like to explain it like this:
When copy-editing I am often the only person who ever reads
an entire text, every word, from cover to cover, before publication. The
commissioning editor or publisher often cannot do this.
In editing for professional publishers I edit in 2, 3, or
maybe 4 ‘waves’: I am reading though and marking ‘style’- ie ‘organisational’
or ‘organizational’ … Caps or l/c for headings…. are there accents missing from
foreign words? But that is just the most superficial level. I am also alert to
problems of sense: did I have to re-read that 4 times or even 2 times to understand?
Did that contradict an earlier chapter? Did that say the same thing as the Fig.
which illustrates it? Do the percentages or figures actually add up? That sort
of thing. So I therefore have to put my red pen away for most of the job and
read. What do I mean by that? I mean I have to read and make notes to the side
before jumping in and ‘editing’.
Rookie editors make too many marks (which cost
publishers money) and jump in too quickly. There is no point making changes
which might need to be reversed for different reasons once you realise what is
going on half way through the text. Likewise it is often useful to edit from
the back of the book forwards, given problems of fatigue experienced by authors…
Most of my ‘big edits’ are done at the very end and take the
form of ‘queries to the author’: ‘when you said that, did you mean that?’ etc.
Very important when working especially with multi-author texts and with authors
who are working in a language which is not their first language or who have
found themselves ‘lost’ in their own academic world or jargon. (I have been published
twice myself so I understand how that happens). I also understand the writing
process: so for example know that ‘see Chapter 8’ might well mean ‘see Chapter
9’ because of redrafting etc.
There are additional issues with legal texts because the
names of Acts, case citations and quotes from judgments often need to be
checked against primary sources, but again, probably only if I ‘smell a rat’ – which
I do from time to time having been doing this for 16 years. …. The authors I
have worked with are always happy with my work and are grateful for
improvements and for my having caught things they haven’t seen. They occasionally disagree with me. I respect that or invite the publisher to decide. That is the publisher's decision. It is part of the process where there is a publisher.
I am NOT concerning myself with fonts and layout etc,
because the typesetter will be ‘pouring’ the text into a design template. But I
might well split paragraphs or make something into a bullet list that didn’t
start off that way (for example).
