Wouldn’t we all love to have a fairy godperson swoop over our work, sprinkle some magic dust and transform it into something readable, accurate, consistent and cogent, every time?
Do we gnaw on our fingernails, stressing over whether we can carve that adjective sensibly into a verb?
No! We find an editor.
An editor’s job is often assisted by software that places squiggly red lines under words like ‘godperson’ (quite rightly). But writers do frequently try to make up their own rules about punctuation and creative wordplay.
Writers and students test the patience of these patient fairy people who lurk, most unfairylike, behind monitors and beside teetering bookshelves. Shelves heave with reference books because these often shy and retiring people are stubborn and have to turn every sentence inside out until they’re happy. They pore over cheat sheets and the internet, phone friends and email other professionals. They never give up. Think of Tinkerbell: l’il old Tink, absolutely stuck on perfection. AI and commercial software have yet to catch all those sneaky incomplete comparisons, cardinal malapropisms and abuses of ‘very’.
Editors tend to come out at all hours, quietly and unobtrusively correcting inconsistent tense shifts, ditching bias, tidying up formatting and regulating lists, quotes and numbering. Silently, they check cross-references, save the author from plagiarism lawsuits, and alter BC for BCE time periods, all before their morning coffee. Shuffling from one source to another, they make sure that data is singular for IT, potentially save lives when marking an author query suggesting 100U for ?10U in that medical product insert, and put possessives in their place. They’ll tot up numbers in tables that should agree with totals but often don’t, check that Tashkent is indeed in Uzbekistan, and that dialogue isn’t dialog. Inconspicuously, they make …. into … and 2m into 2 m, and mark it on an individualised style sheet so that everyone’s on the same page. They sift through paragraph after paragraph, watching for congruence, context and false hypotheses. Oh, the glamour.
These inveterate cleaner-uppers burn the midnight oil, transforming your piece into a masterpiece … or should it be personpiece?
So build a relationship with a real live editor, those who morph into magicians and sweep all the errors into a tidy pile, leaving little personal notes in balloons for you. A click on all the kindly tracked changes rids the page of the distracting red marks and your work is clean, pristine, publishable.
With a professional editor, you can write with confidence, claiming the work (quite rightly) as your own; there’ll be no evidence that Tink made a midnight visit and cleaned up your document.
Because if you’ve used a pro, no one will know.
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