On the Basics: “Falling Back” into a Fall Mindset

by Ruth E. Thaler-Carter

Summer is over (sob) and real life has resumed. Well, for some of us. Freelance editorial professionals probably don’t see much difference between summer and fall/winter/spring; most of us are working almost all the time and don’t have big chunks of time off for summer vacations. Even those with children, who might take more time off in the summer than those of us without, probably still worked during those vacation days or trips.

No matter how you spent your summer, though, there may still have been a sense of time out of mind — even if it was only a memory of school days, when summer was an opportunity to escape our regular responsibilities and routines. Many of our clients take vacations, so a lot of freelance work could slow down, depending on your market or niche.

I like to think of the fall as a sort of new year. We shake off the heat and torpor of summertime and kick ourselves back into normal working mode with the help of weather that’s usually cooler and breezier, with the beginnings of fall colors adding brightness and verve to the landscape. The school year begins, which means a “new year” for young people. The Jewish high holidays officially launch a new year. I find all of this energizing and motivating.

A client recently noted that “Fall is…a great time to update, remodel, redecorate, and landscape your home.” If that’s the case for home and garden work, it’s also the case for our freelance business efforts.

As Better Homes and Gardens editor-in-chief Stephen Orr said in the October 2017 of the magazine, fall is “an exciting time with everyone back in action and plugged in after summer’s off-the-grid vacation months.…There’s something about the shorter days and cooler nights that has inspired the human imagination through the centuries…”

I even like to reverse the “fall back/spring forward” mantra for remembering how Daylight Savings’ Time works; instead, I often think of “fall forward.” No less a figure than F. Scott Fitzgerald agrees with me: “Life starts all over again when it gets crisp in the fall.”

For me, the fall also means a flurry of annual effort as the Communication Central conference approaches. It’s always exciting to anticipate seeing colleagues and friends again at the conference, as well as meeting people who are new to the event. The conference also represents another type of new year — one of new information and knowledge that will inform the rest of the year, along with a new cycle of planning to begin once this year’s event wraps up.

The 2017 conference — the 12^th annual, “Be a Better Freelancer^® – Better by the Dozen” — confirmed that perspective. The combination of new and known speakers with new and known attendees generated an impressive flow of information, tips, insights, approaches, resources, and more over two days of high-impact interaction. Participants came away energized and ready to implement new ideas into their freelance business practices. I even learned a few new techy things myself, such as how to run a webinar. It was exciting!

Some of us have to reset our minds for reality pretty quickly at this time of year. Colleagues who work in the government or nonprofit sector often find the early fall to be suddenly busy. Those clients tend to have budget years that end on September 30, which creates pressure to get a lot of work done within that budget timeframe. It also means that we as freelancers have to gear up to prepare bids for projects in the new year that will begin for these sectors on October 1, creating somewhat of a pressure cooker as we juggle between meeting that September 30 deadline to complete projects under the current fiscal year and visualize what to offer for the new one.

The cooler weather also seems to have an energizing effect on clients who took summer vacations and came back to full inboxes to be cleared as soon as possible.

However you see the fall (there’s always the factor that it presages the arrival of winter and all the hassle that can involve), it’s a good time to capitalize on its vibrant colors and connotations of new opportunities by ramping up our promotional efforts. It’s a great time to contact clients you haven’t heard from or worked with for a while, especially those in government sectors, who might — as noted above — have urgent need of editorial services in a hurry. Let them know that you’re available!

This also might be a good time to brighten up your promotional materials — business cards, websites, brochures, blogs, etc. — with the warm colors of fall. You don’t have to do a wholesale overhaul or redesign, but you might want to add a little “pumpkin spice” to your materials. Thinking in such terms is a good way to refresh your marketing process without necessarily making a huge investment of time or money on major changes.

This can also be a year-round process. If you can enliven your website by adding a fall-themed piece of artwork or color to borders or type, you can keep this technique in mind for when the seasons change again. Don’t go overboard or get too cutesy with clip art, but look at ways you can make your materials pop in tune with the seasons. This could be especially useful for websites, because every change and tune-up increases your visibility in rankings or searches.

How are you “falling into fall”? What new challenges and opportunities does this season represent for your freelance activities?

Ruth E. Thaler-Carter is an award-winning freelance writer, editor, proofreader, desktop publisher, and speaker whose motto is “I can write about anything!”® She is also the owner of Communication Central, which hosts an annual conference for colleagues, and a regular contributor to An American Editor.

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Lyonizing Word: Corruption

by Jack Lyon

Alas, poor Yorick! I knew him, Horatio, a fellow of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy. He hath borne me on his back a thousand times, and now, how abhorred in my imagination it is! My gorge rises at it. . . . Now get you to my lady’s chamber and tell her, let her paint an inch thick, to this favor she must come. Make her laugh at that.

Hamlet, act 5, scene 1.

Corruption is never funny, especially when you’re on deadline and the Word document you’ve been editing starts doing not-so-funny things, such as:

• Repeatedly renumbering pages.
• Repeatedly rebreaking pages.
• Showing incorrect layout and formatting.
• Showing strange or unreadable characters.
• Producing error messages.
• Omitting text that should be there.
• Displaying text that shouldn’t be there.
• Hanging your computer.

All of these are symptoms of document corruption, which is most often caused by one or more of the following:

• Tracked changes in documents moved from PC to Macintosh or vice versa.
• Master documents.
• Nested tables.
• Automatic list numbering.
• Automatically updated document styles.
• Fields, especially cross-references.
• Deleted note reference numbers (in the notes themselves, not in the main text).
• Saving when resources are low.
• A corrupt printer driver (Word often crashes when printing).
• A corrupt document template, especially Normal.dotm.

Early word processors, such as WordPerfect, kept track of text and formatting as a clean, continuous string of characters and codes that looked like this:

WordPerfect Reveal Codes

When creating Word, Microsoft took a different approach, using numeric pointers to specify what was going on in a document. For example, characters 7 through 15 of paragraph 10 might be given the attribute of italic. (That’s not technically exact; I’m just trying to convey the general idea here.) The problem is, those pointers can — and sometimes do — get out of whack and end up pointing at the wrong thing. A typical Word document has thousands of these pointers, which are stored in paragraph breaks and section breaks. Pointers for the document as a whole are stored in its final paragraph break, and this is often where corruption occurs. The usual solution is to “maggie” the document (a process named for Margaret Secara from the TECHWR-L mailing list). Here’s how:

1. Back up your document, so if something goes wrong, you’ll have something to go back to.
2. Select all of the text in the document.
3. Hold down SHIFT and press the left-arrow key to deselect the final paragraph mark.
4. Copy the selected text.
5. Create a new document.
6. Paste the text into the new document.
7. Use the new document rather than the old one.

That, however, may not be enough. If your document has section breaks, they too can hold corruption, which means you’ll need to maggie each section separately—selecting its text, deselecting the section break at the end, and copying and pasting the text into a new document, adding new section breaks as needed. If you have lots of sections, this will take lots of time.

A better solution might be to use a macro that will automatically maggie each section (including the final paragraph mark). Here is such a macro that I hope you’ll find useful when corruption strikes. Note that when using the macro, you should have open only one document — the one you want to maggie.

Sub AutoMaggie()

Dim s As Integer
Dim secType As Integer
Dim secCount As Integer
Dim myDoc As Document
Set myDoc = Documents(ActiveDocument.FullName)

Documents.Add DocumentType:=wdNewBlankDocument
Documents(myDoc).Activate

secCount = ActiveDocument.Sections.Count
For s = 1 To secCount - 1
    secType = ActiveDocument.Sections(s + 1).PageSetup.SectionStart
    ActiveDocument.Sections(s).Range.Select
    Selection.MoveEnd Unit:=wdCharacter, Count:=-1
    Selection.Copy
    ActiveWindow.Next.Activate
    Selection.Paste
    Selection.InsertBreak Type:=wdSectionBreakContinuous
    ActiveDocument.Sections(s + 1).PageSetup.SectionStart = secType
    myDoc.Activate
Next s

'Copy and paste final section
ActiveDocument.Sections(secCount).Range.Select
Selection.MoveEnd Unit:=wdCharacter, Count:=-1
Selection.Copy
ActiveWindow.Next.Activate
Selection.Paste

End Sub

Now let’s look at the macro to see how it works.

Sub AutoMaggie()

That first line simply gives your macro (technically a subroutine, or “Sub”) a name, which can be anything you like.

Dim s As Integer
Dim secType As Integer
Dim secCount As Integer
Dim myDoc As Document

Those four lines set up (dimension) four arbitrarily named variables, which simply hold information. (If you remember high school algebra, you were always trying to solve for the variable X.) Here, s, secType,  and secCount are defined as integers (whole numbers); myDoc is defined as a document.

Set myDoc = Documents(ActiveDocument.FullName)

That line assigns the name of your soon-to-be-maggied document to the variable myDoc.

Documents.Add DocumentType:=wdNewBlankDocument
Documents(myDoc).Activate

Those two lines create a new blank document and switch back to your original document (whose name is stored in myDoc).

secCount = ActiveDocument.Sections.Count

Here, we count the number of sections in the active document (our original) and assign the number to the variable secCount.

Now the fun starts:

For s = 1 To secCount - 1

That tells word to do whatever comes next a certain number of times, starting with the number 1 and ending with one less than the number of sections in our document. Why one less? You’ll see in a minute.

secType = ActiveDocument.Sections(s + 1).PageSetup.SectionStart

Here we get the type (continuous, next, odd, or even) of the next section (“s + 1”) and store that information in the variable secType.

ActiveDocument.Sections(s).Range.Select
Selection.MoveEnd Unit:=wdCharacter, Count:=-1
Selection.Copy

In those three lines, we select the text of the section specified by s: If s is 1, we select the first section; if 2, the second section; and so on. After selecting the section, we move the cursor one character to left so that we’re not selecting the section break (which could hold corruption). Finally, we copy our selection.

ActiveWindow.Next.Activate
Selection.Paste

Here, we switch to our new, clean document and paste the text that we copied from the section in our original document.

Selection.InsertBreak Type:=wdSectionBreakContinuous
ActiveDocument.Sections(s + 1).PageSetup.SectionStart = secType

Next, we insert a continuous section break. Oddly, the first line alone won’t do what we need, even if we specify the Type using the variable secType. We must add the second line, which needs an existing section break in order to work. It turns that break into whatever type we stored earlier in the variable secType. (It took a lot of experimenting to pin down this wretched fact.) Again, we have to add 1 to the section number (“s + 1”) because we’re inserting the breaks after the section text.

myDoc.Activate

Here, we switch back to our original document.

Next s

This is the line that has been incrementing the s variable that we specified earlier in the line “For s = 1 To secCount – 1”.

ActiveDocument.Sections(secCount).Range.Select
Selection.MoveEnd Unit:=wdCharacter, Count:=-1
Selection.Copy
ActiveWindow.Next.Activate
Selection.Paste

We select the last section in our original document, move back one character, copy the text, move to our new document, and paste.

End Sub

Finally, we end the macro.

After running the macro, you’ll be left with your original document (unchanged) and a new, unnamed document that is identical to your original but without the corruption.

That’s it! There are ways to make this macro more elegant and efficient, but, to paraphrase Blaise Pascal, I would have written a shorter macro, but I did not have the time. Nevertheless, the macro works for me; the next time you encounter corruption, I hope it works for you.

________

How to Add a Macro to Word & to the QAT

Here’s how to put this macro (or any other) into Microsoft Word so it will be available when you need it:

1. Copy the text of the macro, starting with the first “Sub” and ending with the last “Sub.”
2. Click the “View” tab on Microsoft Word’s ribbon.
3. Click the “Macros” button.
4. Type a name for the macro in the “Macro name” box — probably the name used after the first “Sub.” For this macro, that’s “AutoMaggie.”
5. Click the “Create” button.
6. Delete the “Sub AutoMaggie” and “End Sub” lines that Word created in the macro window. The macro window should now be completely empty (unless you already have other macros in there).
7. Paste the macro text at the current insertion point.
8. Click “File,” then “Close and Return to Microsoft Word.”

To actually use the macro:

1. Place your cursor at the beginning of the document.
2. Click the “View” tab on Microsoft Word’s ribbon.
3. Click the “Macros” button.
4. Click the name of your macro to select it.
5. Click the “Run” button. (If you wanted to delete the macro, you could press the “Delete” button instead.)

Here’s how to put the macro on Word’s QAT (Quick Access Toolbar):

1. Locate the QAT (it’s probably on the top left of your screen either above or below Word’s Ribbon interface).
2. Right-click the QAT.
3. Click “Customize Quick Access Toolbar.”
4. Under “Choose commands from:” click the dropdown list and select “Macros.”
5. Find and select your macro in the list on the left.
6. Click the “Add” button to add it to the QAT.
7. Click the “OK” button to finish.

Jack Lyon (editor@editorium.com) owns and operates the Editorium, which provides macros and information to help editors and publishers do mundane tasks quickly and efficiently. He is the author of Microsoft Word for Publishing Professionals, Wildcard Cookbook for Microsoft Word, and of Macro Cookbook for Microsoft Word. Both books will help you learn more about macros and how to use them.

If the bomb was dropped . . .

An interesting website where you can enter a location, a bomb yield, and some other information (there are preselects to make it easy), then click the red Detonate button. “Detonating” the bomb tells you how much territory the bomb’s detonation affects. Makes for a very interesting experiment.

Click the following link to go to the Nukemap website:

Another interesting website is Missilemap. Using this map, you can determine whether a missile launched from your backyard (or from any place in the world) can reach any location in the world. Click the following link to go to the Missilemap website to launch your missile:

When the missile blows . . .

Both interactive “maps” were created by Alex Wellerstein.

Richard Adin, An American Editor

The Business of Editing: Undercharging?

Recently, Jake Poinier wrote an essay titled “Stop Worrying About Freelancers Who Undercharge.” It is an interesting essay and one certainly worth reading, especially as the advice he gives, which is summed up in the article title, is sound — as far as it goes.

Overall, I agree with Mr. Poinier’s advice. However, two things particularly struck me about the essay. First, “undercharging” is never really defined. The implication is that people who charge on the low end of the fee scale are undercharging, or if your competitors charge less than you think is the correct rate, your competitors are undercharging. The second item that struck me is that the essay fails to give guidance as to what is a proper amount to charge. After all, undercharging only has meaning if there is a universally accepted amount against which to measure.

(Okay. Actually there is a third thing that I find bothersome: the use of “undercharge” to describe the issue. Undercharging and its opposite, overcharging, are generally associated with a seller–buyer relationship, not with a competitor–competitor relationship. Competitors underbid and undercut. The reason is that there has to be a universally definable and applicable sum against which under- and overcharging can be measured for everyone. That can occur with a readily defined product in a seller–buyer relationship, a good example being price shopping a specific model of automobile. In contrast, with undercutting [or underbidding] there is rarely [if ever] a standard sum; there are too many variables that are unique to each competitor so no standard price exists. Undercutting is relative to the competitor’s pricing strategy, not to identical goods and services. But for this essay, I’ll accept that “undercharging” is the correct term.)

These issues are not only intertwined but need to be tackled in reverse order. So I begin with the measure.

What is the proper amount to charge?

In the world of editing, there isn’t a readily definable, measurable, or acceptable “going rate.” When someone asks the question, “What is the going rate for copyediting?,” no single, universal rate is ever quoted. Just as importantly, there is no universal definition of what constitutes copyediting. True, there are some commonalities that nearly every editor will name but then there are the variations that appear when defining their own services.

If the service does not have a universally definition and if editors cannot state a “going rate” that every editor recognizes as the “going rate,” then how can anyone determine “what is the proper amount to charge?”

More importantly, this is a question that cannot result in universally accepted answer because for each of us the point at which loss becomes profit differs. As importantly, this number changes as circumstances in our life change. This doesn’t mean that there isn’t an answer to the question. It means that the answer is personal and cannot be found by asking in online forums.

The proper place to begin is — as I have stated numerous times — with determining your required Effective Hourly Rate (rEHR). (For details on how to determine your rEHR, see the five-part series, The Business of Editing: What to Charge.) If you do not know what you need to charge in order to be profitable, you cannot know whether you are undercharging — you need something to measure against.

This raises another point, which is implicit in saying that the answer is personal: each editor’s rEHR is personal and different from that of another editor. For example, in my case, my rEHR 25 years ago was significantly higher than my rEHR of today. Twenty-five years ago I had to plan on paying for college for my children, I had to support two automobiles, I had a mortgage to pay, I needed to fund my retirement. Today, my children are years out of college, my mortgage is paid, I only need one automobile, I no longer need to fund my retirement. My circumstances have changed and so has my rEHR. If 25 years ago my rEHR was $50 an hour, then I needed to earn the equivalent of at least $50 an hour to meet my expenses. If I earned $49 an hour, I wasn’t earning enough to break even — I was losing money.

It made no difference if my colleagues were charging the equivalent of $20 per hour — I couldn’t charge that and put food on the table if my rEHR was $50. Were colleagues who were charging $20 undercharging? Or was I overcharging?

Colleagues charging $20 were undercharging if their personal rEHR was higher than $20; if they had calculated their rEHR and it was $15, then they were not undercharging for themselves. That they were able to charge less than me and still be profitable has nothing to do with undercharging — instead, it is a reflection of their business status (and, perhaps, acumen).

That today my rEHR is significantly less than it was 25 years ago and thus permits me to charge significantly less than what a colleague can charge for copyediting (assuming my colleague knows her rEHR and doesn’t charge less than her rEHR) does not mean I am undercharging — underbidding, perhaps, but not undercharging.

What is undercharging?

Editors do not define the services they provide under the rubric “copyediting” identically. Each of us defines what we will do in exchange for a quoted fee. That is the basis for the adage “quality, speed, cost — pick any two.” The idea is that something must be sacrificed and we often define “copyediting” based on this adage.

If, for example, “copyediting” usually includes basic fact checking but the client wants the 500-page manuscript edited in 2 weeks and is willing to pay $500 for our efforts, our definition of copyediting might change to exclude any fact checking. The point is that the definition of the services we each provide is both fluid and not universal.

Yes, some professional organizations and some editors do post online a definition of copyediting, but those are not universally accepted definitions and, at least in the United States, not mandated. So, in the absence of a universally accepted and applied definition of what constitutes copyediting, how can it be determined that someone is “undercharging” for copyediting services? If you include fact checking and I exclude fact checking, our services are not comparable and my lower price may reflect my exclusion of fact checking.

In the end…

What all of this amounts to is this: Ignore what colleagues are charging unless you can determine that everything about your and your colleagues’ services (both as defined and as provided) are identical in every possible way and that everyone’s rEHR is identical. Absent that you should focus your energy on determining what your rEHR is and making sure that you can meet (or better, exceed) that number.

Asking what a colleague charges is a waste of time except for satisfying curiosity. Your fee should be based on your needs (your rEHR). There will always be someone who charges less and the reasons are many, including they are less skilled, they offer a lower-quality end product, their rEHR is very low, or, most likely, they have no clue what their rEHR actually is and have picked a number out of the air because it seems in line with what others charge or has been mentioned online somewhere.

If you haven’t read it recently (or at all), in addition to reading The Business of Editing: What to Charge, take the time to read The Business of Editing: “I Can Get It Cheaper!” A client can always get it cheaper because there is always someone who is willing to work for less. Fighting back by lowering your price is a losing proposition. Instead, learn how to set a correct price, stick with it, and convince clients you are worth it.

Remember this: If you do not think you are worth at least your rEHR, you probably aren’t, and clients will think the same. Clients almost always believe the same about you as you believe about yourself.

Richard Adin, An American Editor

Thinking Fiction: The Novel-Editing Roadmap III

by Carolyn Haley

In Thinking Fiction: The Novel-Editing Roadmap I and Thinking Fiction: The Novel-Editing Roadmap II, I introduced the four stages of my editing process — preflight, formatting, editing, and cleanup — then discussed the first stage: preflight. Preflight involves document setup for the job, then mechanical tidying-up of errors and inconsistencies using editing software tools, so I can focus on content while reading the manuscript. The next stage in my process, formatting, serves the same purpose but focuses on different aspects.

Stage 2: Formatting

Aside from story content, formatting is the biggest variable among the manuscripts I edit. Whereas publisher manuscripts usually come groomed and styled so I don’t have to do anything except copyedit, indie-author manuscripts can arrive in any condition, and I usually have to clean them up in some way beyond editing the words.

Some authors have studied submission requirements to agents or publishers, and send their manuscripts to me in “industry standard” format of one-inch margins all around, double spacing, and conventional font such as Times New Roman 12 (with a few still using the now old-fashioned monospace font, Courier). Other authors present their work with a gaudy cover page, autogenerated table of contents, headers and footers, and fancy typefaces, with the text in single space or something — anything! — else. Many older authors know how to type and spell but have no word processing skills, so they use manual tabs or spaces for paragraph indents and insert extra returns for chapter breaks; other authors, lacking knowledge of conventional publishing practices, use all caps and/or bolding and/or underlining for chapter titles and emphasis.

These flourishes must be removed from the manuscript before it’s published or, in many cases, before it’s submitted to an agent or acquiring editor. Consequently, I offer preproduction formatting as one of my editorial services. I spent years as a typesetter and enjoy that kind of work. As well, it’s more efficient for me to format a manuscript than to teach someone to do it or wait while my client has someone else do it, as would be the case if I insisted on specific formatting before accepting the job. I am frequently the last (or only) person to handle a file before my client submits it anywhere, so I like to deliver it ready for its fate. In situations where the author plans to pay someone for formatting, the author gets a better deal having it done as part of editing — and I get a better paycheck for the extra work.

Where I remain inflexible is with file format, meaning, which software created the document. A few maddening, time-wasting, unprofitable experiences with Pages and OpenOffice files moved me to only accept files created in Microsoft Word. PC or Mac doesn’t matter, release version doesn’t matter, but the file must be native to Word — this is nonnegotiable! This policy is not only to avoid problems for myself, but also for the production people after me, whose layout programs are designed to play nicely with Word. The day will come when I’ll have to change my policy, but until it becomes obvious that I must adapt to demand or lose work, I’m holding firm on this requirement.

Formatting as a supplement to preflight

Formatting the manuscript myself has an additional benefit. As mentioned in Thinking Fiction: The Novel-Editing Roadmap I, I have a blind spot to work around. Because of the way my memory functions, I can’t preread a manuscript without dulling my eye to editing it. Formatting provides a passive preview that gives me a sense of the book and lets me spot oddball elements not picked up during preflight, while keeping the story fresh to discover during editing.

I don’t use any editing software tools for formatting beyond Word’s built-in Styles features and menu. They serve for my approach, so I don’t feel compelled to change. I like to crawl through the whole document with nonprinting characters and coding showing, with Word’s Styles pane open and set to show what styles are used in the document. I may do this in Print Format view or Draft view; which view alters with circumstance and mood.

During the crawl, I look for and fix anything that wasn’t caught during preflight. There’s almost always something aberrant, and I can’t predict what it might be. The most common irregularities pertain to numbers. Examples include time indicated in different ways (e.g., 2:00 PM, 4 p.m., seven o’clock), variations in measurement (e.g., five-foot six, 5’6”, five-feet-six; or 20 miles vs. twenty miles), different styling of years (e.g., the sixties, the 60s, the 1960’s, the Sixties) or firearm terms (.45, 45-caliber, a 45; or 9mm, 9-millimeter, nine millimeter). In each case I need to choose which style to use and apply it consistently through the manuscript. Sometimes it’s a matter of correctness (e.g., changing the 60s to the ʼ60s); most times it’s a matter of whose preference to follow (mine, Chicago Manual of Style’s, or the author’s). Whatever I decide goes onto my style sheet, which contains a section specifying which types of numbers are spelled out and which are expressed in numerals, including examples of each. Attending to these types of consistency elements during formatting reduces the number of details I must notice and address during editing.

Styling

My dual aims in formatting are to make the manuscript easy for me to read and navigate, and to make it clean and consistent for future production. If the document arrives neatly put together, all I do is style the chapter heads with Heading 1, one of Word’s default styles. The Heading 1, 2, 3 (etc.) styles appear in Word’s navigation pane, enabling me to jump back and forth between chapters with a click instead of scrolling or searching.

I also make sure that chapter breaks are formed by a “hard” page break (either manually by CTRL+Enter or with “Page break before” selected when establishing the Heading 1 style), rather than any kind of section break or insertion of returns. This is to help whoever follows me in the chain. The production person, for instance, may need to do a global find/replace for some styling or layout purpose I’m not privy to. Consistency makes that task much easier, so I ensure that there’s only one return between the last paragraph of every chapter and the page break for the next, and no returns preceding the next chapter number/title.

For messier manuscripts, I’ll get in deeper, if scope of work allows. Many times I style the body text and chapter heads using Word’s defaults: Normal for text, and Heading 1 (2, 3, etc.) for chapter number/title/subtitle. This combination is a reasonably safe, generic setup for when I don’t know the book’s ultimate configuration. I modify the fonts, line spacing, and indents of these styles to suit the job, but might change them during editing for easier viewing onscreen. For example, the job may need to be delivered in Times New Roman, but I find that font hard to read, especially punctuation. My eye is more comfortable with a sans serif font, such as Calibri. By using Word’s Styles for text and headings, I can change fonts simply and swiftly, then enlarge them onscreen as needed.

With the basics done, I focus on italics, which are heavily used in fiction for emphasis and many forms of silent communication, as well as for media titles and ship names, noises, and foreign or alien words. To ensure that italics survive any font changes or cross-platform file moves during the manuscript’s progress from creation to publishing, they need to be set in a character style rather than a paragraph style. Although italics set with Word’s default tools (taskbar icon, menu commands, or keyboard combo [CTRL+i]) hold up well during most manuscript manipulations, they sometimes come undone for no apparent reason, and it’s a miserable waste of time to restore them.

I avoid this random possibility by one of two means. If the manuscript comes in clean, then I just create a character style for italics and globally find Word’s default italics and replace them with the character-style italics. Using a character style makes the italics always identifiable because even if the text doesn’t appear italic, the text that is supposed to be italic can be located by finding the text to which the character style is applied. If the manuscript is really messy and I must change something in Normal or any different style(s) the author used, I first globally find/replace the default italics to put them into color and then do whatever else I have to do (sometimes clearing all styles and restoring just the ones needed). Finally, I replace the colored italics with the character-style ones. For technical reasons I don’t understand, font color survives heavy text manipulation, whereas the default italics setting sometimes does not. By using one of these methods, I don’t lose the italicization even if I have a corrupted file to salvage or foul things up with my own mistakes.

Upon completion of formatting, I create a new copy of the manuscript and plunge in to discover its story.

Carolyn Haley, an award-winning novelist, lives and breathes novels. Although specializing in fiction, she edits across the publishing spectrum — fiction and nonfiction, corporate and indie — and is the author of two novels and a nonfiction book. She has been editing professionally since 1977, and has had her own editorial services company, DocuMania, since 2005. She can be reached at dcma@vermontel.com or through her websites, DocuMania and New Ways to See the World. Carolyn also blogs at Adventures in Zone 3 and reviews at New York Journal of Books.

On Politics: A Great Song Made Greater

One of the classics in pop music is Simon & Garfunkel’s “Sound of Silence.” A future classic in the satire hall of fame political collection is this lyric-updated, politically astute version of that classic (here’s the link in case it disappears again: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CxCjvEabN70):

Some of you might prefer the original untainted, nonsatirical, but not nonpolitical version by Simon and Garfunkel, so here it is:

Additional parodies worth viewing include these:

Perhaps this is the best thing, so far, about the Trump presidency: a never ending resource for comedy.

Richard Adin, An American Editor

A New Season on AAE

Monday, September 11, begins a new season of essays on An American Editor. In addition to our current contributing essayists — Ruth Thaler-Carter, Jack Lyon, and Carolyn Haley — I am looking for additional contributors. If you are interested in writing for AAE, please contact me (rhadin[at]anamericaneditor.com).

The new season will begin with part III of Carolyn Haley’s Thinking Fiction: The Novel-Editing Roadmap series. Parts I and II were published just before the summer hiatus began. They are available on AAE: Thinking Fiction: The Novel-Editing Roadmap I and Thinking Fiction: The Novel-Editing Roadmap II.

We hope you will find our new season of essays valuable, interesting, and helpful.

Richard Adin, An American Editor

The Lesson of Bohemian Rhapsody

Sometimes an editor can learn a lesson from another discipline. Here are different performances of the same song (except for the Colbert parody). It reminds me of the differences between editors — some are competent, some are incompetent; some are professional, some are unprofessional; some are ethical, some are unethical; some are good, some are great.

But most importantly, it illustrates an important lesson that too many editors have either forgotten or failed to absorb: Often the original is best.

First up are the Muppets:

Pentatonix does an excellent job, and certainly one that is praiseworthy, but is it really an improvement — in contrast to simply being different — of the original?

These children also do a fine job performing on the Colombia version of The Voice, but is this an improvement over the original?

In this tribute performance to Freddie Mercury, who had died, Elton John, the remaining members of Queen, and Axl Rose perform Bohemian Rhapsody. Although it is clear that the performance is professional, I don’t think it rises to the same level as the original. Modifications were needed to accommodate the voices of the singers, thereby, I think, providing a good, but not great, performance.

Finally, before we get to the original, here are two parodies based on Bohemian Rhapsody. The first is Stephen Colbert:

The second is a Star Wars parody:

At long last, here is the standard against which all other versions are judged — the original Queen version as written and performed by Freddie Mercury:

Although all the versions of Bohemian Rhapsody have their merits (and demerits), in the final analysis the original Queen version rises to the top. This illustrates that sometimes the original is best, a lesson a lot of editors need to learn. Probably the single, most often made complaint by authors against editors is that the editor changed what didn’t need to be changed, that the editor made it worse.

Every editor needs to remember that change for change’s sake (or because the editor thinks he/she can say it better) is not the best approach to editing.

Richard Adin, An American Editor