The Subversive Copy Editor: Advice from Chicago (or, How to Negotiate Good Relationships with Your Writers, Your Colleagues, and Yourself) (Chicago Guides to Writing, Editing, and Publishing)

152 Pages·2009·0.88 MB·English

by  Carol Fisher Saller

THE
COPY EDITOR
On Writing, Editing, and Publishing The Chicago Guide to Collaborative
Jacques Barzun Ethnography
Luke Eric Lassiter
Telling about Society
Howard S. Becker How to Write a BA Thesis
Charles Lipson
Tricks of the Trade
Howard S. Becker Cite Right
Charles Lipson
Writing for Social Scientists
Howard S. Becker The Chicago Guide to Writing about
Multivariate Analysis
Permissions, A Survival Guide: Blunt Talk Jane E. Miller
about Art as Intellectual Property
Susan M. Bielstein The Chicago Guide to Writing about Numbers
Jane E. Miller
The Craft of Translation
John Biguenet and Rainer Schulte, editors Mapping It Out
Mark Monmonier
The Craft of Research
Wayne C. Booth, Gregory G. Colomb, and The Chicago Guide to Communicating Science
Joseph M. Williams Scott L. Montgomery
Glossary of Typesetting Terms Indexing Books
Richard Eckersley, Richard Angstadt, Nancy C. Mulvany
Charles M. Ellerston, Richard Hendel,
Naomi B. Pascal, and Anita Walker Scott Getting into Print
Walter W. Powell
Writing Ethnographic Fieldnotes
Robert M. Emerson, Rachel I. Fretz, and A Manual for Writers of Research Papers,
Linda L. Shaw Theses, and Dissertations
Kate L. Turabian
Legal Writing in Plain English
Bryan A. Garner Tales of the Field
John Van Maanen
From Dissertation to Book
William Germano Style
Joseph M. Williams
Getting It Published
William Germano A Handbook of Biological Illustration
Frances W. Zweifel
A Poet’s Guide to Poetry
Mary Kinzie
THE
COPY EDITOR
ADVICE FROM CHICAGO
(OR, HOW TO NEGOTIATE GOOD
RELATIONSHIPS WITH YOUR WRITERS,
YOUR COLLEAGUES, AND YOURSELF)
Carol Fisher Saller
the university of chicago press
Chicago and London
Carol Fisher Saller is a senior manuscript editor at the University of
Chicago Press and editor of the Chicago Manual of Style Online’s Q&A.
The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637
The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London
© 2009 by Carol Fisher Saller
All rights reserved. Published 2009
Printed in the United States of America
18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 09 1 2 3 4 5
isbn-13: 978-0-226-73424-8 (cloth)
isbn-10: 0-226-73424-2 (cloth)
isbn-13: 978-0-226-73425-5 (paper)
isbn-10: 0-226-73425-0 (paper)
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Saller, Carol.
The subversive copy editor : advice from Chicago (or, how to negotiate
good relationships with your writers, your colleagues, and yourself) /
Carol Fisher Saller.
p. cm.—(Chicago guides to writing, editing, and publishing)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
isbn-13: 978-0-226-73424-8 (cloth : alk. paper)
isbn-10: 0-226-73424-2 (cloth : alk. paper)
isbn-13: 978-0-226-73425-5 (pbk. : alk. paper)
isbn-10: 0-226-73425-0 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Copy editing. I. Title.
pn4784.c75S25 2009
808'.06607—dc22
2008031055
o The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements
of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—
Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ansi z39.48-1992.
No passion in the world is equal to
the passion to alter someone else’s draft.
h. g. wells
Contents
Introduction ix
PART ONE
WORKING WITH THE WRITER,
FOR THE READER(cid:2)1
1 The Subversive Copy Editor 3
2 The Good Launch 13
3 Working for the Reader, through the Writer: Carefulness,
Transparency, Flexibility 23
4 When Things Get Tough: The Diffi cult Author 31
5 Dear Writers: A Chapter of Your Own 43
PART TWO
WORKING WITH YOUR COLLEAGUES
AND WITH YOURSELF(cid:2)55
6 When Things Get Tough (the Sequel): The Dangerous
Manuscript 59
7 Know Thy Word Processor 71
8 The Living Deadline 81
9 That Damned Village: Managing Work Relationships 91
10 The Freelancer’s Quandaries 103
11 The Zen of Copyediting 111
Appendix: You Still Want to Be a Copy Editor? Breaking In 117
Acknowledgments 121
Further Reading 123
Index 129

Introduction
I hear you.
As the editor of the Chicago Manual of Style’s monthly Q&A, I’ve
been reading your questions about writing style since the University
of Chicago Press launched the Q&A in 1997. That amounts to tens of
thousands of queries from students, professors, copy editors, busi-
nesspeople, and authors who struggle as they write and edit. As of
this writing, the Chicago Manual of Style Online website receives about
two million visitors per month, and the Q&A is the most frequently
visited page. Fortunately for us, most of those visitors do not submit
questions.
The Chicago Manual of Style, for the uninitiated, is one of the
E nglish-s peaking world’s most revered style manuals. Although
Chicago style may not have the most users, it surely has the most de-
voted. From its beginnings in the 1890s as a simple in-h ouse sheet of
proofreading tips for manuscript editors at the University of Chicago
Press to its current CD-R OM, online, and print editions, it has grown
into a bible for writers and editors in almost every kind of writing out-
side journalism (where Associated Press style and New York Times style
dominate).
Written by the Manuscript Editing Department at the University
of Chicago Press (where I work), the Manual of Style has chapters on
everything from punctuation and capitalization to mathematics and
ix