Adventures in Copyediting

n. can you not do a course via yr current place of employ? (i forget what this is, so if a brewery ignore me)

Come to the U.S. and I guarantee you a high-paying and prestigious editing job if you want one.

And I know all this because it was (indirectly) hammered into my head by my HS's alumnae director, whom I would help out to fulfill part of my community service requirement. She's also the same woman (again, another nun!) who told me that "sophomore" basically means "wise fool", because "sopho-" comes from "sophos", which is apparently Greek for "wise", and "more" comes from "moron", and that in one's sophomore year one has to determine whether one is going to be either wise or foolish throughout the rest of one's educational life. Er, or something to that effect.

They were tiring!

I am not at all surprised that he drinks bourbon, btw. He just seemed like that kind of guy.

anyway, if it's for a professional-type place, i'd ask $25. you might get it, and if not it's not like it does any harm to set the bar high. maybe if they were planning on paying you $15 they'll at least bump it up to $20.

i've never freelanced, now i'm looking at a thousand-page project (fiction) and trying to figure out how to win it with a cheap quote.

do people expect some kind of bulk savings on that much work? or is it reasonable to aim at something like an hourly or per-page rate that's close to market rate for smaller pagecounts? (i've seen a bottom end of $20/hr or $3/page for proofing, and more for light copyediting, etc.)

would it be normal to offer to chunk the work out into installments, both to assure the client and to assure me that i would actually get paid behind it?

I was getting $25/hr when I freelanced, but that was probably inflated a bit because I had a prior relationship with my clients. It wasn't fiction, either, dunno much about that realm.

I did the work in chunks/piecemeal but that was more due to how things were going on their end than mine. It does help break some of the monotony and avoid monolithic deadlines, which I've always hated.

Just had a brilliant idea for software that would make copy-editing 100x easier (but wouldn't automate the work and eliminate human jobs). Too bad I don't write code.

WMC, do you know of any boards dealing with copyediting and graphic art, specifically online? I have so many things I do on the fly that are just kinda rule-of-thumb that I can't find any definitive style for. Like, if you link something in quotes, do you include ''the quotes'' or only what's inside ''the quotes?'' What if you have a question mark?

I had a graphic the other day that appeared in print spread across two pages, and had to figure out how to put in a 600x400 box online. I finally split it up, letting the reader scroll to part two, part three, but it didn't really feel all that creative. Hard to find anything related to that kind of stuff beyond "Check out this new vector logo I made!"

I've never run across any boards like that -- I imagine they're out there and would be handy, but I've been in my little creativity-free cocoon so long now I've never gone looking for them.

Or we publish Nielsen ratings every so often. Should I make them as a <table> chart or as art? Looks better as art, but you can actually search for what you're looking for if it's text.

I lie awake at night, twisting and turning, wondering if the deputy online editor for the Shreveport Business Gazette is going through the same thing.

for god's sake YES make them as a table!!

past tense ppl how the fuck hard is that to understand

when that understanding has been achieved past tense will have been understood

Just found a staunch vs stanch error in a published article ABOUT THE EDUCATIONAL SYSTEM god help us all.

pls say it was in a blood-loss metaphor

Of course.

Every time someone says "staunch the bleeding" I think, if you were a doctor your patient would already be dead.

i just keep staunching and it keeps coming

nurse!! more staunchers for staunching!!!

I dunno, io. That seems like word magic to me. People are somewhat flexible on such matters and often can make correct inferences on the fly, based on the close resemblance of the incorrect word to the correct one.

this is the copyediting thread

it is not about being flexible on any matters

otm

neither do patients die when doctors fail to consult copyeditors in the ER on the finer points of grammar, spelling and usage, so it all comes out in the wash

Word MAGIC?? Wtf is that supposed to be, telepathically DIVINING what someone means when there's a perfectly good and correct word for it that they haven't bothered to use? In a presumably edited article from an official news source about the quality of public education? (lol & sob in eternal rotation)

copyeditors: proudly saving bleeding patients from incorrect grammar since 1460

lol-sob blob, we poor slobs

http://gizmodo.com/the-latest-plan-to-fix-the-silicon-valley-housing-crisi-1796745226

Toxic vapors, dangerous gasses, and ground water contamination are all issues that have to be accounted for.

toxic vapors AND dangerous gasses I tell you

point taken. it would be an unusual dangerous gas which did not include toxicity among its dangers.

Wish I could've been there when the editor finally had to step in.

https://i.imgur.com/ogsQScm.png

In AP style, in composition title case, the "to" in an infinitive verb is capitalized. Here's a quote from AP's entry for "composition titles":

Capitalize both parts of a phrasal verb: “What to Look For in a Mate”; “Turn Off the Lights in Silence.” But: “A Life of Eating Chocolate for Stamina”; “Living With Both Feet off the Ground.” (Note the different uses of for and off, and thus the different capitalization, in those examples.)

Capitalize to in infinitives: “What I Want To Be When I Grow Up.”

So in the title cited above, "What to Look For in a Mate," how would you characterize the "to" in "to Look For"? Is that "to look" not regarded as part of an infinitive verb because it is part of a noun phrase? It doesn't seem to be a preposition in that it is not the head of a prepositional phrase.

Am I missing something here? Why do you think AP lowercases "to" in that title example?

I am at a loss. Interestingly, when you Google "capitalize both parts of a phrasal verb," you get results from university style guides that use these same example titles, meaning they have presumably have been copied from the AP Stylebook, and some of them do style it "What To Look For..."

AP title case is the most infuriating thing about living editing in the USA

I think that might be a typo in the style guide? It sounds like it’s offering that and the next one as examples of infinitive capitalization, so from context it seems like it should be capitalized.

AP title case is the most infuriating thing about living editing in the USA

God, tell me about it. This is the first year I've been working with it and it is complete nonsense.

It sounds like it’s offering that and the next one as examples of infinitive capitalization

No, the first example is purely about how to capitalize a phrasal verb in general, and seems to only be focused on capitalizing the base verb and the prepositions/particles that follow. The very next bullet in the entry is about how to handle infinitive verbs, but is unrelated to the previous bullet's instructions other than that they're both concerned with composition titles. I'm leaning toward the idea that it might be a typo in the guide.

I don't think it's a typo, I think it's a poorly chosen set of examples; the examples raise more questions than they answer. The first example could have been a phrasal verb, like "Look Out" or "Speak Up" that wasn't preceded by the preposition "to." Say, "Keep Up with the Joneses"

The point is just showing a word you wouldn't ordinarily cap in title case, capped because it is in a phrasal verb. Then the second example should show a little word that is not part of a phrasal verb, and leaving it uncapped. Like "What's up Bob's Ass?"

Infinitives are just clouding the issue. My take? You only need to understand it as well as your boss/client does.

Like, 99.9% of the people you work for don't know the rules, and also don't give a shit. So you can pretty much always get away with bluffing.

Editor: "Oh yeah, that's lowercase because it's in the pluperfect cadence. If it were an irregular semiposition, well, that's a different story."

Client: "Uh, okay, you're the expert."

Editor: "Here's my invoice."

I hear that... it's tough to just let stuff go sometimes. I have to deal with this stupid title case all the time so I would at least like to understand it lol

they *are* badly chosen examples but it's also a typo: "to look" in the first one is still an infinitive and no parsing reason has been given to ignore the requirement to cap up "to" in an infinitve

expand both of them into fully verbed sentences:
A1) I Know What to Look For in a Mate
A2) I Know What I Need to Look For in a Mate
B) I Know What I Want To Be When I Grow Up

what reason could be given to distinguish A1 from A2?
what reason could be given to distinguish A2 from B?
what reason could be given to change the capitalisation if/when you strip out "I Know"?

Hard to argue with that! I like it

Yeah I lean toward typo too. Someone should alert the AP! I know they have other things to worry about right now, but can't be letting standards slide like this.