Editor response format.

[emap]

What he said. With an addendum actually, I don't edit stories, my command of sentence structure and tenses suck, I do write them and speaking from experience, a full edit is a prefered thing unless I get some feedback on why my editor did not do all of it.

Snoopy did that to me on the last one but he did say why, I went back and altered the parts he had problems with and ended up with a better story.

Without the why he did not edit the whole story I probably would have just taken what he had done and combined with the rest and posted it, would not be an H story. I'm not going to say not editing the whole story is bad or something but you do need to say why your not editing the whole thing in big lettering. Otherwise your not really helping the author and we all need help.

 

[WhiteWave48]

Complete or partial edit?

*****

 

[LLorelei]

If you don't know the right way, you improvise.

Hello all -

You know, I've learned more about the mechanics of editing just by reading this thread than I've picked up in years of actually doing it.

It looks like the technique I've developed is different from those described by the other editors here. Based on the comments I've read, I'm going to modify it a little, but it's different enough that maybe some would find it interesting.

You see, I haven't had much experience with Word's markup function, and hand-highlighting and then inserting suggestions has to problems for me. It's tedious and (as someone else already observed) the author has to do a lot of cleanup to get the in-line stuff out before he submits the story, and could potentially miss things.

What I do instead is create a two-celled table in Word and paste the rough draft in one cell (left side, incidentally) and put my comments in the other. The document forms two columns, one of story and one of comments. This gives me all kinds of room to make suggestions, point out problems, etc. The only drawback is that I have to put a lot of carriage returns in my column to make the comments line up with the story, and the author needs to pay attention to the spacing if he makes any changes while the story is in the columns/cells. The payoff, however, is that the author can copy his story back out and paste it into a new document without having to erase or change colors or anything.

I generally fix small things in the body of the story: spelling, punctuation, double words, tense problems. I think that the editors who posted here about systems that indicate all changes have a point, though. How is the author going to improve his style if he doesn't see the corrections as corrections? In future I think I'll try a three-column approach (in landscape, I think, or else the columns will be too narrow) with the rough draft in one, the fixed draft in another, and my comments in a third.

I've had positive responses from the authors I've helped using this format, but any comments my fellow editors might have would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,
LLorelei

 

[Weird Harold]

A good technique if a bit cumbersome.

The two cell/window in landscape is the way Word 97 handles comments when the content of the comments is displayed. The main difference with your technique is that both windows move to the relevant comment/marker automatically.

I generally fix small things in the body of the story: spelling, punctuation, double words, tense problems. I think that the editors who posted here about systems that indicate all changes have a point, though. How is the author going to improve his style if he doesn't see the corrections as corrections?

The reviewing tools toolbar allows the change tracking to be turned on or off. Some blanket changes I do don't make a difference to the edit because they're generally invisible -- deleting extra spaces between words and adjusting the spaces between sentences, for example and I do those with tracking turned off.

However, any change/correction that changes (or even potentially changes) the meaning of what the client intended to write should be highlighted in some way that is difficult to miss and easy to undo/de-highlight for posting.

 

[sr71plt]

Some of this seems unnecessarily convoluted. I use Word's tracking system (but avoid the comment feature--putting author's queries directly in the body of the manuscript between brackets), and that seems to have worked fine and has melded with mainline publisher procedures for nearly 150 book manuscripts for some 30 mainline publishers. There is, as WH notes, a realm of format changes maded before turning the tracking changes on--getting rid of all (absolutely all) of the fancy styles formatting (everything is returned to the "Normal" setting), the double character spaces after periods (the computer isn't a typewriter), extraneous spaces and line spaces elsewhere, dash and ellipsis use not following publishing standards, etc.

I keep a separate style sheet of corrected spellings and hibitual punctuation and grammar mistakes found in the manuscript. The author gets the edited copy (either in hard copy or in passworded electronic form so that he/she can't make changes I don't see) and style sheet for review and returns it to me with embedded comments. I clean it up and send a copy of the cleaned manuscript to the publisher along with the style sheet. If they want to see the edited manuscript ,I have have that available. I back up all versions--original, edited, and cleaned on floppy disks. And I keep all records until a year or so after the book has been published.

I use whatever style/presentation authorities the publisher specifies--mostly the Chicago Manual of Style, 15th edition (but sometimes AP or the MLA); Webster's Collegiate dicitonary, edition 11;.and whatever specific style guide the publisher has.

I don't do much rewriting--and whatever I do in the manner is done without removing the original so the author can see both versions. The author is mostly responsible to rewrite until it's understandable/acceptable.

It's not all that complicated or convoluted in the real world of publishing.

 

[snoopercharmbrights]

... What I do instead is create a two-celled table in Word and paste the rough draft in one cell (left side, incidentally) and put my comments in the other. The document forms two columns, one of story and one of comments. This gives me all kinds of room to make suggestions, point out problems, etc. The only drawback is that I have to put a lot of carriage returns in my column to make the comments line up with the story, ...

In Word, if you open the story, select all (Ctrl-a), and then create a table using "paragraphs" as the "separate text at", and specifying 2 columns you will get one paragraph per row which will make spacing easier.

... The payoff, however, is that the author can copy his story back out and paste it into a new document without having to erase or change colors or anything. ...

I have a macro which takes out all the coloured comments and I can "accept all changes" to give me a clean edited copy of the document which I send back to the author along with the commented version.