Quandaries

Wow, it's been a long time since I was here. I'll bet even Jerry (my only reader at last count) has given up. Oh well, oh hell.

I've just posted the following on my www.greenmarketpress.com blog for Nov. 28. But if you stumble into Editorland, you can say you saw it here first. Here goes:

QUANDARIES

When I feel like pontificating about editing, I usually do it on my Editorland blog, which at last count was read occasionally by one other person. So I’m pretty safe there.

But today I feel moved to muse about a curious condition of editing, or more particularly proofreading. This will not be a pontification, because I have no answer to the problem posed.

The condition has to do with (1) the desire and need of copyeditors and proofreaders to have “bright lines”—definitive answers—in order to do their jobs, and (2) the fact that the rest of the world, including writers and readers, seldom gives a damn.

Here’s an example. I work with writers who produce material that has many lists. These are usually prefaced with an introductory sentence along the lines of “There are five conditions, as follows:” or “The following steps complete the operation:”

Note the colon. The Chicago Manual of Style and I agree that it should be there in each of these cases.

But what about this example? “The following six steps are always necessary, and the operation will fail if you neglect any of them.”

This looks like a simple statement to me—one that should end with a period, even though the next thing up is a list. So I’ve performed a colonectomy.

But I know I’m not going to get by with this when the copy reaches the proofreaders. They want a bright line, either all periods or all colons after all sentences containing the word “following.” So did I when I was on the copy desk. I didn’t have time to stop and reason about whether a colon or a period was required in a particular instance. I just wanted to zip through the copy and go home.

Now that I’m a writer (and an editor supervising writers), I can live happily with ambiguity. I trust the colon/no colon decision to my ear, knowing 999 of 1,000 readers won’t even notice (and the remaining one is locked up in an institution).

But the proofreaders are waiting, waiting. I can hear them muttering. And that creaking sound. It’s the tumbril, isn’t it?