Industrial Editing

Some sing the joys of editing (I've done so myself), but those who've been around a while know that much of it is just hard slogging---industrial editing. To quote the late guru John Bremner, "You have to love the thrill of monotony."

Industrial editing requires much patience, the ability to sit in a chair for a long time, and the recognition that you're not going to be entertained very often. Horst Piewak, my old printer friend in Wuerzburg, Germany, has those qualities, which is why the Main Post gave him the job of setting railroad timetables. Karl-Heinz Mack, in UPI Frankfurt, was not exactly an industrial editor, but he also let no tough and knotty job faze him: "Dafuer bin Ich Redaktor!" (For this I am an editor!), he would exclaim as he waded in.

These thoughts are occasioned by some recent technical and scientific editing jobs, notable for their density and pickiness. Some of them involve intensely detailed step-by-step instructions to computer programmers. This is not a field with which I'm intimately familiar, and I don't have to be---technical editors will vet the code. I have to look at organization, syntax, consistency of style, cohesion and coherence (not the same things), and whether headings reflect a logical outline.

Over on the scientific side, the same factors obtain. I'm the pro bono copyeditor for a new on-line journal, Tropical Conservation Science, which is also dense with arcane terms and trade lingo. Industrial editing. (It's not quite pro bono---the editor, a friend, has paid me by adding my name to the magazine's board of directors. At the top of the list is a distinguished scientist from the Smithsonian Institution. At the bottom, 40 names down, am I, which is about the right pecking order.)

Editors become editors (and even industrial editors) by doing it for many years, and by developing a kind of awareness that can read the dullest prose for an hour at a time with exquisite attention. After a few years, it becomes nearly impossible to read for pleasure. The misspelling, the errant comma, are always jumping up and waving. You have arrived as an editor when you find yourself editing the small print on billboards as you sail by at 70 m.p.h.

This is true even in the most abstruse technical and scientific prose. It is why the computer programming book I'm currently editing will have "public directories," not "pubic directories." Spell-check wouldn't have helped there.

But alas, even the most veteran editor can turn this attention only to the work of others. I know (I know!) that I can't edit my own work satisfactorily. Karen helps a lot, but when I opened the first copy of my new book, Places & Stories, my eye went straight to the typo in the punchline of the culminating story. Sigh. I'm correcting it, with pencil, in every copy.