On the Basics: New resources for freelancers

By Ruth E. Thaler-Carter, Owner

An American Editor

I’m breaking precedent with a Sunday post to share some professional good news: The updated edition of my “Freelancing 101” booklet for the Editorial Freelancers Association (EFA), featuring new input from EFA Publications chairperson Robin Martin, and the updated new edition of the EFA’s “Resumés for Freelancers” booklet, which I’ve co-authored with original author Sheila Buff, are among the new publications available at the EFA’s new bookstore:
https://shop.aer.io/editorial_freelancers_association_bookstore

Robin deserves a huge round of applause for herding cats (um, authors) and – even more challenging – organizing the new bookstore.

I hope our subscribers find these publications useful. They were a lot of fun to produce and should be – if I say so myself – excellent resources for various aspects of a freelance editorial (not just editing) business.

Advertisement

Measuring and Managing for Greater Productivity and Profit

By Jack Lyon

The famous management consultant W. Edwards Deming is often quoted as saying “If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it.” Here’s what he actually said: “It is wrong to suppose that if you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it — a costly myth.” (The New Economics, 35.)

An example of something that can’t always be measured (but can be managed) is the quality of copyediting on a particular manuscript. Two different editors might not always see the same problems or fix them in the same way. So how do you manage your effectiveness as an editor? Is it based on your consistency in styling citations? Does it depend on your knowledge of a manuscript’s subject matter? Could it have to do with the comprehensiveness of your reference library? Copyediting depends on a number of factors that can only be described as subjective.

But unless you’re editing only as a hobby, there is one thing you should definitely be measuring and managing: your income — to be specific, your effective hourly rate. American Editor Rich Adin has written about this at some length (see, for example, “Thinking About Money: What Freelancers Need to Understand” and “Business of Editing: What to Charge”), and you should definitely read and heed his advice about this. You’re probably someone who works mostly with words, so don’t be put off by the math in these articles! It’s really important to understand what Rich is saying.

I know editors who make just enough money to stay above the poverty line; I also know editors who consistently make an income of six figures (yes, really). Would you like to know what makes the difference?

Those in the first group charge by the hour.

Those in the second group charge by the project (or the page, or the word, or even the character).

If you charge $50 an hour for your editing services, the most you can ever make is $50 an hour. But if you charge $5 a page, your hourly income depends on how many pages you can edit during that hour. If you can edit 10 pages, you’ll still make $50 an hour. But if you can edit 20 pages, you’ll make $100 an hour. To do that, you’ll have to be more productive (while still maintaining your usual quality), which means you’ll need the Microsoft Word add-ins I provide at the Editorium, particularly Editor’s ToolKit Plus.

Daniel Heuman’s PerfectIt will add even more to your productivity by automatically ensuring the consistency of your work.

Rich Adin’s EditTools provides a wealth of features created especially for the working editor. I particularly like Never Spell Word and Toggle Word.

To manage your effective hourly rate, though, there’s one thing you really need to measure: how many hours you spend on every project you edit. Now, if only someone would invent some software specifically for editors to track those hours. Well, that’s exactly what Rich Adin has done in his latest version of EditTools.

Rich calls this new feature Time Tracker, and you’ll find it on the left side of the EditTools ribbon:

Time Tracker on EditTools Ribbon

Time Tracker alone is well worth the price of admission, even if you never use any of the other features in EditTools (although you will). I won’t go into all the specifics about how to use Time Tracker, because Rich has already done so in an impressive series of articles at An American Editor called “It’s All About the Benjamins” (the complete 55-page Time Tracker Help file in PDF format is also available for download). And by “Benjamins,” Rich means money — which you should have more of, if you follow his advice and use this new tool.

By keeping careful track of the amount of time you spend and the amount of money you make on each project, you’ll soon be able take advantage of the PDSA (Plan-Do-Study-Act) cycle, made popular by our old friend W. Edwards Deming. The Deming Institute defines this cycle as “a systematic process for gaining valuable learning and knowledge for the continual improvement of a product, process, or service.” Making money, for example.

If you keep track of your effective hourly rate (EHR), you’ll be able to answer questions like these:

• What kinds of jobs bring in the most money?
• Which clients actually pay the best overall?
• When during the day am I at my most productive?

Then, using the PDSA (Plan-Do-Study-Act) cycle, you can do things like this:

• Focus on the kinds of jobs that bring in the most money, and turn down those that don’t.
• Solicit more work from clients that pay the best, and drop those that don’t.
• Work when you’re at your most productive, and do something else when you’re not.

As you continue to use this cycle of improvement, you should see dramatic improvements over time in your overall income. Others have done it, and you can, too. It’s simply a matter of measuring and managing, using the right tools to improve your productivity and efficiency, and collecting and analyzing the data.

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.

It’s All About the Benjamins! EditTools’ Time Tracker (Part V)

By Richard Adin, Founder, An American Editor

In It’s All About the Benjamins! EditTools’ Time Tracker (Part I), I discussed the importance of collecting data; in Part II, I discussed Time Trackers’ Project Summary; in Part III, I discussed some of the key elements of the Create/Update Project dialog, and in Part IV, a project was created and data to evaluate how the new project was going were created. This final discussion (Part V) focuses on some of the other important features of Time Tracker.

Updating Information

Sometimes things change and we need to change the project information we originally entered. Time Tracker has two different types of information updating.

The first is updating the basic project information itself. To change the original project information, select the project name — not a subpart’s name — and click Update Project (#2), as in the image below.

Updating a project

Clicking Update Project opens the Create/Update Project form for the selected project (see below). Once that form is open, you can modify any of the data. For example, if the client contact information changes, you can replace the outdated information with the new information.

The Update Project form

If instead of updating the general project information, you want to modify already-recorded data (the project details), select the project line if the project has no subparts, or the subpart that you want to modify if the project has subparts, and click Update Details (#A below). Note: The selected project or subpart must have some already-recorded data or Update Details will not be accessible. For example, in the image below, contrast the subpart 01 Bumble Batch 1, which is selected, with the no-subpart project Visions in Freudian Therapy (green highlight). If Visions in Freudian Therapy was selected, Update Details would not be accessible because the project has no already-recorded data to modify.

Selecting the data to be modified

Clicking Update Details (#A above) opens the Update Record (below) where the data modifications are entered.

The Update Record form

The Update Record form shows all of the data entries that are part of the selected subpart (#B) (or project, if there are no subparts). The first entry line (“0 hours, 0 minutes, 0 pages”) was created when the subpart/project was created. That line should be left alone because modifying it will distort your data. The next two lines shown (#B) are the data from the two work sessions that were part of Batch 1 (see Part IV of this series). Because the second work session is selected for modification, the component parts of its data are shown in the modification area (#C).

You can either modify some or all of the data, or leave the information as is. To leave it as is, click Close. Otherwise, modify the data that need modification (see below) and click Update (#D) to make the modifications. In this example, two modifications are being made: the subpart name (“(Preliminary)” is added) and the page count (increased from 17 to 18, which changes the total page count for the batch from 22 to 23, and for the project from 53 to 54).

Modifying work session 2 data

Once Update (#D in above image) is clicked, the modifications are recorded and visible on the Project Summary (green highlight in image below).

• Important: Compare the highlighted numbers for the Effective Hourly Rate (EHR) and Average Pages per Hour (APH) for the project, batch, Year-to-Date (YTD), and Lifetime shown here with the same numbers, before the modification, shown in the previous image of the Project Summary. It is worth noting the effect a one-page change, from 17 to 18 completed pages, has, especially on the EHR.

The modified data displayed on the Project Summary

Other Options: Removing/Reinstating Projects from/to the Project Summary

As time goes by, the number of projects will increase, which, if not removed from the Project Summary, will make it difficult to access current projects. Consequently, Time Tracker lets you remove completed projects from the Project Summary and save them. But removal from the Project Summary doesn’t mean the project dataset is lost.

Completed projects that have been removed from the Project Summary can be accessed using the History button (see image above).

To remove a completed project from the Project Summary, select the project, not a project subpart, to make the Remove From List button accessible. Then click Remove From List.

• Caution: If a subpart is marked completed but there are still open subparts for the project, selecting the completed subpart and clicking Remove From List removes the entire project, not just the completed subpart. If that happens, go to the History and reinstate the project.

A removed project can be reinstated in the Project Summary via the History button. In addition, a completed project, once reinstated in the Project Summary, can be reopened via the Reopen button.

For more-detailed information about removing and reinstating projects, as well as reopening projects, see the Time Tracker Help file.

Other Options: Archives

Part IV of this essay series discussed Time Tracker’s autosave feature. However, there is another part of the autosave feature that was not discussed in Part IV: autosaving of the Time Tracker data.

Time Tracker’s Archive is a temporary backup of project data in the event that something happens while you are working on the project. (It is called “temporary” because only 10 datasets are saved; when the 11th save occurs, the oldest dataset is automatically deleted, leaving 10 available saved datasets. When a project is completed, the saved “temporary” datasets — up to 10 — remain available.

One other item to note: Unlike Word’s temporary files, these datasets do not use the .tmp extension. For more detailed information about Archive files, see the Time Tracker Help file. Should data become corrupted or lost from an unexpected event like a document crash, the Archive file can give you the data from the time of your last (up to 10) timing stop. Every time you stop Time Tracker, it creates an Archive file. The problem is that the archive is created only when you stop timing. Consequently, if you last stopped timing two hours ago and Word crashes, in addition to having lost some of your work, you will have lost the time calculation that occurred between the last stop and the crash.

The Archives, however, prevent a total loss of data and can tell you when the last stop occurred, so you can calculate how much time passed between the last stop and the crash event. To protect against total data loss, you can access up to the last 10 data saves; when the 11th save occurs, the oldest save is deleted.

For more-detailed information about the archiving feature, see the Time Tracker Help file.

A Final Word

Time Tracker is probably the most-valuable macro an editor can have and use. Truthfully, I wish I had it when I started my editing career 35 years ago. The data that Time Tracker tracks are the data I have tracked over those years, because for me, there was nothing more important than being sure I was making a profit.

I had a family to support, retirement to plan for, health insurance to buy, a mortgage to pay, children heading to college, insurances and taxes to pay, and the list goes on. It made no sense to work at something that couldn’t support me and my family, no matter how much I enjoyed my work and no matter how good I was at it. Family brings on more paramount concerns and obligations, making knowledge about how my business was doing essential.

Having been in other businesses before becoming an editor, I was aware that it is easy to be fooled into living paycheck to paycheck, just getting by, and not really earning a living wage. As the years passed and the editorial business changed (when I began, it was the publisher who directly hired you, not a low-priced, third-party, offshore company), the compensation battle became more difficult. As people lost jobs or couldn’t find work, more people offered editorial services (“I love to read and easily found spelling errors in XYZ book, so perhaps I should be an editor!”), so competition increased. All of this and more made keeping and interpreting data ever more important.

Properly used, Time Tracker will help you track how you are doing so you know whether you can continue as you are or need to find ways to become more productive and efficient so you can increase your Effective Hourly Rate (EHR). Time Tracker will help you prepare better bids based on past similar projects and determine whether current clients are desirable clients.

In addition, Time Tracker data, combined with knowing your required EHR (rEHR), will help you determine what to charge. For example, if your rEHR is $30 but your average EHR (i.e., over multiple projects — the YTD and Lifetime calculations) is $25, you know that you need to either increase your rate or find a way to be more efficient and productive so that the YTD and Lifetime EHRs exceed $30.

Finally, Time Tracker data can help you ascertain which method of setting a fee works best for you over multiple projects (see my AAE essay, “The Rule of Three”), as well as which types of projects (e.g., fiction or nonfiction, fantasy or romance, biography or medical, short or long documents) and services (e.g., copyediting, proofreading, developmental editing, indexing) generate the most work, income, and profit.

The complete and detailed Time Tracker Help file is available for download from wordsnSync.

Richard (Rich) Adin is the founder of the An American Editor blog, author of The Business of Editing, owner of wordsnSync, and creator/owner of EditTools.

Why Do You Edit?

By Daniel Heuman

When I present at editing conferences, I’ve started asking the audience one question: Why do you edit?

The answers I get back are amazing and diverse; for example:

• I like helping people tell their stories.
• I contribute to medical research and change lives.
• It gives me a good work-life balance.
• I make science happen.
• I help people communicate.
• I get paid to read books!

The one answer that I’ve never heard is “I like checking consistency of hyphenation.” Nobody has ever told me that their driving force, the reason that gets them out of bed in the morning, is “making sure abbreviations are defined when they are first used.” That’s why editors love PerfectIt. It makes the mechanical elements of editing faster and easier, so you can focus on what matters. And that’s why I’m excited to announce the details of PerfectIt 4, our first new edition for Windows users since 2015.

The Basics of PerfectIt

If you haven’t used PerfectIt, its core philosophy is that humans make the best editing decisions, and they always will. The role of software is to help people make those decisions faster. PerfectIt doesn’t know what’s right. Instead, it alerts you to points in the document that could be errors. It leaves every decision up to you.

Here are some of the errors that PerfectIt helps you find:

• Inconsistent hyphenation (e.g., “email” in one place, but “e-mail” in another).
• Abbreviations that haven’t been defined or have been used before they’re defined.
• Capitalization inconsistency (e.g., “Government” or “government”).
• Brackets and quotes left open.
• Numbers in the middle of sentences (spelled out or in numerals).
• Inconsistencies in list punctuation and capitalization.
• Use of sentence case or title case in headings.
• Different spellings of the same word (e.g., “adviser” or “advisor”).
• Common typos that spellcheck won’t find (no more “line mangers” or “pubic consultations”).

You can also use PerfectIt to enforce house style rules. The program is customizable so you can build in your own preferences. That’s useful for both freelance and in-house editors. If you’re a freelancer, PerfectIt lets you build in a style sheet for each client so it’s easy to keep track of different preferences. For an in-house editor, PerfectIt helps you enforce your style manual. You can set up your team with PerfectIt and make sure everyone at your organization follows the style manual (at long last).

PerfectIt doesn’t do anything that you can’t do. You can find and correct every error described above manually. However, these errors are time-consuming to find and easy to miss — and checking them is not why you edit! Checking mechanical errors is necessary work, but every minute you can save on the mechanics is more time for substantive editing.

What’s New in PerfectIt 4

In PerfectIt 4, we concentrated on one thing: increasing that time saving. We did that in two ways: improving PerfectIt’s initial scan and changing the interface. You can see it here.

In the past, PerfectIt’s initial scan was when you could step away from the computer and treat yourself to a cup of coffee or check your social media. With PerfectIt 4, a scan that could take as long as 5 or 10 minutes is now over in seconds. Coffee and social media will have to wait!

The biggest change in the interface is that every location now has a separate fix button. That makes it easier to use the preview text to see context and make changes. The time saving is just a second or two for each fix. However, the effect is cumulative. If you save a second or two on each fix, that can be a minute or two on each document. When you add that up over the course of a year, it’s significant.

Time savings aren’t the only improvement. We’ve also made changes to PerfectIt’s styles. We’ve added support for GPO Style, and we’ve updated WHO Style, UN Style, EU Style and American Legal Style. In addition, you can now base a style on an existing style. So if you do legal editing, you can start with PerfectIt’s built-in American Legal Style and build your own preferences on top of that.

Do More of What You Love

We made saving time the focus of PerfectIt 4 because that’s what every professional needs. Time saved on mechanics is more time for substantive editing (or more time for family, hobbies, and things that have nothing to do with editing). Do something you love. Checking for consistency mistakes is an important part of the job, but it isn’t why you edit.

Daniel Heuman is the CEO and founder of Intelligent Editing. PerfectIt is available for a 14-day free trial or a $70 per year purchase at intelligentediting.com. You can purchase it for just $49 per year (30% discount) if you’re a member of one of these professional editing associations.

EditTools 9 with Time & Project Management Macros Is Now Available

By Richard Adin

It has taken nearly two years to create the newest release of EditTools, but EditTools 9 is now available (http://www.wordsnsync.com/download.php). New features in EditTools 9 include:

• Backup (http://www.wordsnsync.com/backup.php)
• Counter (http://www.wordsnsync.com/counter.php)
• Open Dialog Manager (ODM) (http://www.wordsnsync.com/odm.php)
• Revision Tracking (http://www.wordsnsync.com/revision-tracking.php)
• Time Tracker (http://www.wordsnsync.com/time-tracker.php)

Time Tracker not only lets you keep track of the time you are spending on a project, but it also keeps data about your projects and calculates your Effective Hourly Rate (EHR) and Average Pages per Hour (APH) for the specific project, all projects worked on in the current year, and all projects over your career.

EditTools 9 requires a new license; your EditTools 8 registration number will not work with EditTools 9. There are two versions of EditTools 9: a full version for a first-time EditTools user and an upgrade version for registered users of EditTools 8. Unlike past upgrades, the upgrade is not free.

For details about how to upgrade from EditTools 8 to EditTools 9, see the information at “Download Upgrade to EditTools v9 from v8.”

Richard (Rich) Adin is the founder of the An American Editor blog, author of The Business of Editing, owner of wordsnsync, and creator/owner of EditTools.

The Business of Editing: The Line in the Sand

Richard Adin, An American Editor

As I have gotten older, I have found that things in life have reversed, by which I mean that things that once irritated me no longer irritate me and things that didn’t irritate me now do irritate me. Yet there are a couple of things that irritated me when I began my editing career that continue to irritate me today, although today’s irritation level is more strident.

One example of a continuing irritation we have already discussed on An American Editor — the question that both inexperienced and experienced editors never seem to get tired of asking, even though they have been told hundreds, if not thousands, of times that there is no such thing: What is the going rate? (For that discussion, see A Continuing Frustration — The “Going Rate”.) Today’s irritant is the fast-schedule-but-low-pay project offer, which also has been previously discussed on AAE in, for example, Business of Editing: Schedules and Client Expectations, Business of Editing: Workdays & Schedules, and The Business of Editing: The Standard Editing Workday & Workweek.

What brings this back to the forefront is that this month I have already declined four offered projects that combined amounted to 11,000 manuscript pages (which, of course, raises another issue, what constitutes a manuscript page, a topic previously visited on AAE; see, e.g., The Business of Editing: A Page Is a Page — Or Is It? and The Business of Editing: How Many Pages an Hour Do You Edit?). I declined the projects because I am already under contract to edit two books by the end of April that combined run a bit more than 19,000 manuscript pages.

I would have declined the four offered projects even if I were twiddling my thumbs and staring at an empty work basket because the pay rates were abysmal and the schedules Orwellian.

Consider just one of the projects. The client’s estimate was that the number of manuscript pages was 2,500. Based on past experience with this client, I know that the true number of pages (by “true,” I mean as calculated using my formula, not their formula) would raise that number by at least 25% and more likely closer to 35%. The size is fine; in fact, it is my preferred project size — bigger is better — since I do not like to tackle small projects (less than 1,000 manuscript pages), even though I occasionally will (most of the projects I take on run 1,500+ manuscript pages and many run 7,500 to 15,000 manuscript pages).

The client’s schedule was Orwellian: two weeks to complete copyediting. The schedule was matched by the abysmal rate offered: $2.60 per manuscript page. And, according to the client, the manuscript required heavy editing, which in the client’s parlance meant none of the authors’ primary language was English. (The subject matter was medical.)

Unlike some editors who have imaginary lines that they draw and claim they will not (but always do) cross, my lines are like those of the Great Wall — in stone, permanent, immovable, and I will not cross them. I told the client that I was declining the project because the schedule was Orwellian and the pay abysmal. For me to take on the project, the shortest possible schedule would be based on editing 400 manuscript pages per week with the count done using my formula and a rate of $15 per page. The more reasonable the schedule, the lower my per-page rate would become until we hit my absolute minimum, which was still higher than their offered rate.

My two uncrossable lines are these:

1. The schedule must be doable in the real world, not a fantasy world.
2. The compensation rate must correlate with both the schedule and the expected editing difficulties (i.e., does the client rate this as a light, medium, or heavy edit and what do those terms mean in the client’s parlance).

I know how fast I can edit because for 34 years, I have mostly edited manuscripts from the same subject area and I have kept careful records. In addition, I have created tools, like my EditTools macros, and use tools created by others, like Jack Lyon’s Editor’s Toolkit Plus, that are specially designed to make my work more accurate, efficient, and speedy.

I know how much I need to charge for my editing work because I have calculated my required effective hourly rate (also discussed in prior AAE essays in detail; see the series Business of Editing: What to Charge) and I know how much I want to charge for my work so  I make a profit, not just break even. And I know how much of a premium I require to be willing to work longer hours than my standard workday and workweek (see The Business of Editing: The Standard Editing Workday & Workweek for a discussion of work time).

The point is that if I cross those lines I have drawn, I hurt myself. Why would I ever want to hurt myself? In the olden days, before I knew better and before anyone with experience set me on the correct path, I thought if I accepted a project that was on a tight schedule with low pay, it would get me an in at the company, get me more work, and give me a chance to show how good an editor I am, with the result being that the company would offer me better-paying projects to keep me as part of their editorial stable. It didn’t take long for me to learn that the only fool in that scenario was me.

Sure, I got more work offers, but never at a better rate nor on a better schedule. As one project manager told me, I had already demonstrated I could handle the schedule and was willing to work for the offered rate, so that is all I would ever get.

I drew my lines and I never cross them.

I know that some of you are shaking your head and saying that you can’t afford to do that. I did the same until I realized I was always behind and never moving ahead — I was enriching my “clients” at my expense. Once I took my stand, I found that I was getting better projects and better pay — not starting the next day, but starting in the not very distant future.

Successful editors are successful businesspersons, too. Successful businesspersons do not do things that benefit others at their expense. They draw lines that they do not ever cross. I have drawn mine; are you ready to draw yours?

Thinking Fiction: The Novel-Editing Roadmap IV

by Carolyn Haley

In Thinking Fiction: The Novel-Editing Roadmap III, I described my approach to formatting client manuscripts (Stage 2 of a four-stage workflow). As in preflight (Stage 1), formatting gives me a preview of content while attending to technical preparation of the file, so when I finally settle down to edit (Stage 3), I can give content full attention.

Preflight is described in The Novel-Editing Roadmap I and II; formatting is described in The Novel-Editing Roadmap III.

Stage 3: Editing

Part of my rationale for not prereading a manuscript is to be able to see it as a regular reader would: start on page one and read to the end. I have a hint of what’s to come from preflight and formatting, just as a reader of the published book might have a hint from jacket copy and reviews. Beyond that, the novel is as unknown to me as it is to them.

My editing modus operandi is to read until I stumble. Depending on the manuscript, my stumbling may occur often or intermittently; and depending on the scope of work, I’ll emend, query, or ignore the stumble once I’ve identified its cause.

A stumble can be anything. Because different readers perceive the same book differently (i.e., reader subjectivity), it’s impossible for an editor to anticipate every conceivable stumbling point. Consequently, I frame my expectations according to genre conventions and commonly held standards of craft (writing technique and storytelling), and respond to what breaks my attention.

Where start-to-finish reading differs between me and the pleasure reader is that I stop and act at any stumble, whereas the reader reacts to stumbles by sliding past them or abandoning the book if there are too many of them. My job is to keep the reader attached to the story by removing stumbling points.

The first few chapters always go slowly, for that’s when characters are introduced, the plot and conflict(s) are established, and the writer’s skill or lack thereof becomes evident. It’s also when I construct the primary elements of the style sheet and decide upon its best layout. After that, things proceed more steadily and smoothly.

Simple corrections, such as spelling, punctuation, and minor deletions and transitions, can be popped in as I go. Stumbles that require more than a few seconds to address get highlighted in yellow. Some of them might be explained later in the story, so there is no point spending time on them prematurely. If a stumble is not explained by the end, I’ll have to do a bit of research, or give further thought to recasting or querying. I make these decisions in a dedicated pass after completing the main edit.

The need to highlight occurs so often that I created a macro to reduce multiple menu steps into a two-finger keyboard command that’s easy for me to remember. For yellow highlighting, I use the command CTRL+y, and to insert a comment balloon, I use CTRL+F11. My comments range from simple queries, such as selecting a word and suggesting an alternative with a question mark (e.g., in a description of a sword with an ornate handle, the query would be hilt?), to complex descriptions of a story problem and suggesting solutions. Other queries are just requests for clarification of ambiguous phrasings or actions.

I also use some of Word’s built-in keyboard shortcuts, such as ALT+F6 to jump between open Word documents (e.g., the manuscript and style sheet), and ALT+Tab to move between applications (e.g., between Word, email, reference websites, and a search engine). This saves a lot of mouse clicking.

One of the most time-saving macros I’ve found is one of the hundreds provided in Paul Beverley’s macro collection, Computer Tools for Editors. I overlooked it until Louise Harnby wrote about it in “How to never forget you’ve switched off Track Changes!” in her Proofreader’s Parlour blog. Once the macro has been installed, it places a symbol on Word’s toolbar, which upon clicking changes screen color to signal that Track Changes is OFF. This alert has saved me hours from having to backpedal and reedit after getting crossed up with Track Changes’ active/inactive status. The alert plus two single-key commands I recorded for showing and hiding tracking (F10 to show, F12 to hide), put an end to Track Changes fumbles.

Another big time-saver came from purchasing access to Merriam-Webster’s online unabridged dictionary. I used to check spellings in my paper copy of Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, 11th ed., until I realized how rapidly seconds were adding up to minutes and hours. I recovered my cost for the online version in the first book I edited afterward. I’ve not yet made the paper-to-online switch with my primary style guide, Chicago Manual of Style, because in fiction adherence to style is more flexible than in nonfiction, and I use CMS much less often than the dictionary. Nevertheless, I gained efficiency through an online/hardcopy combination. I’ve always found the CMS index to be confusing, and therefore time consuming, so I was prone to not consulting the reference when I should. I’m also frugal, so I didn’t want to spend for a resource I wasn’t going to heavily employ. Now I use the online CMS site as an index (no charge) by searching for a topic. That usually brings up the relevant chapter number and section, leading straight to the information I want in the book.

Second pass

After completing the main edit, I review everything I highlighted and address whatever the highlights flagged. That may require rephrasing clumsy wording, or investigating a questionable fact, or composing a technical explanation about a hitch in scene logistics and suggesting solutions. At first I searched for each highlight by scrolling; then I tried opening the Find/Replace window and searching for Highlight. That required a tiresome number of menu steps, so I recorded a macro for keyboard commands that advance to the next highlighted text and remove its highlighting. The pair of close-together key sequences (CTRL+Shift+| for find highlight and ALT+\ for unhighlight) lets me use my nonmouse hand to rapidly jump to and clear highlighting. (This combo is also useful during preflight when reviewing the many highlights inserted by Never Spell Word.) When I want to mass-clear highlighting or catch any highlight I failed to remove manually, I run EditTools’ Remove All Highlighting macro. Although this tool can remove particular highlight colors on demand, I don’t differentiate colors during my process so have not employed that option.

Next I review my comments and queries, to make sure they are courteous and clear. This, too, I previously did by scrolling, but now I use EditTools’ Comment Editor. This tool puts all comments in one window and lets you jump to whichever one you want with a click.

Last, I attend to miscellaneous. Throughout the main edit I jot notes about items I don’t highlight or query in the manuscript because they might not fall within scope of work. Usually they involve the writer’s technique. For instance, if the manuscript was loaded with fuzzy phrasing, like he made his way through the crowd (vs. he wove or shoved through the crowd); or weak phrasing, like he was running (vs. he ran) or he started to run (vs. he ran); or the author has a pet word or phrase that’s been overused (one of my memoir clients hopped on his bike about two hundred times, when he could have gotten on, jumped on, or mounted the bike occasionally), I might run searches for the phrases in question and reconsider them for editing or querying.

Once every note is crossed off my list, I tidy up any lingering mechanical and consistency details.

Stage 4: Cleanup

I start cleanup by making another copy of the file, then work down a checklist.

Quotation marks come first, owing to the prevalence of dialogue in fiction and the myriad typos it can contain. Using a series of search strings I haven’t bundled into a macro yet, I ferret out missing punctuation inside quotes (Find: ^$”) and missing periods at paragraph ends (Find: ^$^p), then switch to wildcard searches for incorrect punctuation between the quoted matter and the speaker, such as, “I’ll go to the store.” she said (Find: .^0148 ([a-z]), with variations on caps and period/comma). I also make sure all quotation marks and apostrophes are “curly” typographer style rather than straight (Find: ^0034 for ” and ^0039 for ‘).

Finally, I run Paul Beverley’s MatchDoubleQuotes macro to catch any quotation mark pairs that are incomplete. I use another Paul Beverley macro to find duplicate phrases, since Word’s spellcheck will only find duplicate single words (e.g., the the). The Duplicate Phrase macro finds two-word repeats and three-word repeats, including a variant that highlights them, to catch such errors as she went to went to the store. However, it can’t find illogical sequences resulting from clumsy revisions, like he the will. For those, I must reread the document and hope my eye will catch them second time around.

It’s been suggested that I save the illogical phrases as I come across them to an F&R Master dataset in EditTools, which is a good idea that I plan to try. No such phrases have popped up since I received the suggestion, so I can’t yet testify to the utility of the idea. In the meantime, I’ve tried different settings in Word’s grammar checker, and investigated other grammar checkers on the market, but not found anything to help catch my worst and most frequent editing error (he the will and its ilk). I therefore never promise a client a perfect job.

Before my own proofreading pass, I run PerfectIt to find consistency errors in spelling, hyphenation, abbreviation, and capitalization, followed by Word’s spellchecker to catch the last typos and dropped spacing between words or sentences. When that’s done, I set up for proofreading: change the font (and eyeglasses), move to a different computer and chair, hide the tracked changes and comments from showing onscreen, and read the book from start to finish. Leftover bloopers and questions reveal themselves during this phase.

Last, I play it safe by manually checking for little mistakes I might have introduced during the edit, such as extra spaces between words or before punctuation — but I don’t rerun File Cleaner, having done so in preflight. At the end of the edit I’m afraid to do anything involving a global replace as I will not see the whole manuscript again and deeply fear an ugly surprise when the author reviews it.

Closure

Before delivering the edited manuscript, I take an extra spin through the comments to make sure they meet the three p’s: polite, professional, and precise. That’s the final editing step. For delivery, I prepare two files: the first with all edits showing, to demonstrate that I’ve done my job and let the author accept or reject whatever they please; the second with all edits accepted and only comments showing. Most clients work with the second document because they are satisfied with the edits and want a clean version of the manuscript to enter their own revisions into.

Finally, I organize and pretty-up the style sheet and prepare a cover letter to the author (or project coordinator for a publisher job). With new clients or iffy payers, I create a PDF of the all-changes-showing file and send it with the bill. With proven clients, I just send the final Word files and the author sends back a check.

The job usually ends here because most of my jobs involve copyediting or line editing and the client moves on from there. Sometimes I get the book back for revision checking and commentary, and I always keep the door open to author questions. Many of them keep in touch regarding their progress. Better yet, they come back with their next project.

By the time I receive the author’s next project, I’ve learned another tool or trick and refined my procedure — although not always for the better. Learning is as much about figuring out what doesn’t work as what does. The route to finding out what editing process works best for oneself is to acquire the proven software tool packages — EditTools, Editor’s ToolKit Plus, PerfectIt, and Paul Beverley’s macro collection, Computer Tools for Editors — and start experimenting. Also, take classes, read how-to books and blogs, and participate in forums where colleagues discuss their methodology. It’s a dynamic process that never really ends and can be adjusted as one’s skill set matures.

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.

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.

From the Archives: Editors & “Professional” Resources: A Questionable Reliance

(The following essay was originally published on
 An American Editor on May 20, 2010.)

Editors rely on lots of “professional” resources to guide their editorial decisions when working on a manuscript. In addition to dictionaries and word books, we rely on language usage guides and style manuals, among other tools. [To learn more about the professional editor’s (and my) bookshelf, see The Professional Editor’s Bookshelf.]

But it isn’t unusual for an author (or publisher) to have a different view of what is appropriate and desirable than the “professional” resources. And many editors will fight tooth and nail to make the client conform to the rules laid down in a style manual. As between language usage guides like Garner’s Modern American Usage and style manuals like The Chicago Manual of Style, I believe that editors should adhere to the rules of the former but take the rules of the latter with a lot of salt.

The distinction between the two types of manuals is important. A language manual is a guide to the proper use of language such as word choice; for example, when comprise is appropriate and when compose is appropriate. A style manual, although it will discuss in passing similar issues, is really more focused on structural issues such as capitalization: Should it be president of the United States or President of the United States? Here’s the question: How much does it matter whether it is president or President?

When an author insists that a particular structural form be followed that I think is wrong, I will tell the author why I believe the author is wrong and I will cite, where appropriate, the professional sources. But, and I think this is something professional editors lose sight of, those professional sources — such as The Chicago Manual of Style (CMOS) and the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association — are merely books of opinion. Granted we give them great weight, but they are just opinion. And it has never been particularly clear to me why the consensus opinion of the “panel of experts” of CMOS is any better than my client’s opinion. After all, isn’t the key clarity and consistency not conformity to some arbitrary consensus.

If these style manuals were the authoritative source, there would only be one of them to which we would all adhere; the fact that there is disagreement among them indicates that we are dealing with opinion to which we give credence and different amounts of weight. (I should mention that if an author is looking to be published by a particular publisher whose style is to follow the rules in one of the standard style manuals, then it is incumbent on the editor to advise the author of the necessity of adhering to those rules and even insisting that the author do so. But where the author is self-publishing or the author’s target press doesn’t adhere to a standard, then the world is more open.)

It seems to me that if there is such a divergence of opinion as to warrant the publication of so many different style manuals, then adding another opinion to the mix and giving that opinion greater credence is acceptable. I am not convinced that my opinion, or the opinion of CMOS, is so much better than that of the author that the author’s opinion should be resisted until the author concedes defeat. In the end, I think but one criterion is the standard to be applied: Will the reader be able to follow and understand what the author is trying to convey? (However, I would also say that there is one other immutable rule: that the author be consistent.) If the answer is yes, then even if what the author wants assaults my sense of good taste or violates the traditional style manual canon, the author wins — and should win.

The battles that are not concedeable by an editor are those that make the author’s work difficult to understand and those of incorrect word choice (e.g., using comprise when compose is the correct word).

A professional editor is hired to give advice. Whether to accept or reject that advice is up to the person doing the hiring. Although we like to think we are the gods of grammar, syntax, spelling, and style, the truth is we are simply more knowledgeable (usually) than those who hire us — we are qualified to give an opinion, perhaps even a forceful or “expert” opinion, but still just an opinion. We are advisors giving advice based on experience and knowledge, but we are not the final decision makers — and this is a lesson that many of us forget. We may be frustrated because we really do know better, but we must not forget that our “bibles” are just collections of consensus-made opinion, not rules cast in stone.

If they were rules cast in stone, there would be no changes, only additions, to the rules, and new editions of the guides would appear with much less frequency than they currently do. More importantly, there would be only one style manual to which all editors would adhere — after all, whether it is president or President isn’t truly dependent on whether the manuscript is for a medical journal, a psychology journal, a chemistry journal, a sociology journal, or a history journal.

Style manuals serve a purpose, giving us a base from which to proceed and some support for our decisions, but we should not put them on the pedestal of inerrancy, just on a higher rung of credibility.

Richard Adin, An American Editor

From the Archives: The Business of Editing: The Art of the Query

(The following essay was originally published on
 An American Editor on December 8, 2014.)

Over the years (31 years in another month), I have had the privilege of working with a lot of colleagues and being on the receiving end of a lot of job applications. That has given me an insight into how editors view aspects of their job and how they go about applying for work.

In a previous essay, Business of Editing: Losing the Chance, in “Error 6” I discussed the copyediting test and how it is possible to tell whether an applicant passed or failed the test within one minute. One way to tell is to look at any queries. (Of course, the lack of any queries can also be very revealing.)

Most editors do not understand the variety of roles that queries fulfill. If you want to kill future prospects, a quick way to do so is with poor, no, or little (when more than a little is expected) querying. Queries should be viewed as playing these roles, at minimum:

• to ask the author a question
• to demonstrate to the author and to the client (assuming your client is not the author) that you are knowledgeable
• to explain
• to market your skills
• to make the author and client comfortable with you
• to demonstrate why you are the editor that the author and client should always seek out

Each of these roles is linked to your success as a professional editor.

To Ask a Question

Editors get tired of writing the same query repeatedly, chapter after chapter, even project after project. Repetition is deadly but let’s face it, many of the queries we need to ask remain the same author to author, client to client, and project to project. After a while, there is a tendency to scale back on the query because it is tedious to retype. This is where a tool like EditTool’s Insert Query macro is a solution to a problem.

What I have seen is repeat queries being truncated. The first time, maybe the second time, the editor will write:

AQ: There is no section by this title in this chapter. Is this the correct section title? Please either provide the correct section title or modify the incorrect section title.

But it isn’t long before that query becomes “AQ: Please provide the correct section title,” which shortly thereafter becomes “AQ: Need correct section title,” which soon becomes “AQ: Section title?” — or, which also often happens, the query starts and finishes as “AQ: Section title?”

The first query identifies the problem, asks the question, and offers alternative solutions — it shows that you are a professional editor. But the pared down versions show laziness and a lack of understanding of how to communicate with an author. More importantly, the message you are sending your client — whether the client is the author or the publisher — is that you are not a professional.

The pared down versions also suffer from being incomplete. How do you expect the author to understand what the problem is and the solutions are from a cryptic message? (The worst queries I have ever seen were “AQ: ?” How can one form a response? My initial reaction was to reply “ED: !!!”)

To Demonstrate Knowledge and Explain

We all have lots of competition. One way we convince clients to hire us again or to recommend us to colleagues is by demonstrating our knowledge, whether it be of the subject matter or of something else appropriate.

For example, it is common in books that I edit for authors to confuse “recur” and “reoccur.” Consequently, where I think they may have confused the terms, I ask:

AQ: Recur/recurrence mean to happen again repeatedly; reoccur/reoccurrence mean to happen again but only once. Which do you mean here?

This query demonstrates my knowledge of language and raises an important point, because it does matter greatly whether something happens repeatedly or just once again. (And I make my life easy by having this as a standard query in my EditTools Insert Query dataset so I only need to select it and insert it, not type each time I want to use it.)

Two additional examples of queries that I routinely use in my editing work are:

AQ: Should “/day” be changed to “/dose” or should “divided” be added before “bid”? As written it appears that the daily dose is to be given multiple times a day. Please make clear the frequency.

and

AQ: Do you mean “e.g.” rather than “i.e.”? When the items are only examples and the list is not all inclusive, “e.g.” is used. If the listed items are all the possibilities, then “i.e.” is used. If “i.e.” is correct, consider moving the material from the parens and making it a proper part of the sentence.

Notice the messages I am communicating. First, I identify the problem; the author does not have to guess. Second, I explain why it is a problem. Third, I provide solutions. Both the author and the client can see that I am carefully reading the manuscript, I am thinking about the manuscript (i.e., I am focused), I care about the manuscript and the author, and, above all, that I am knowledgeable about editing — that is, that the editor’s primary role is to help the author communicate clearly and that one tool in the editor’s toolbox for doing that is for the editor to communicate clearly with the author.

The point is that queries can serve multiple purposes and I want all of those purposes to reflect positively on me.

To Market and to Comfort

Every author is anxious about the editor. After all, the author has invested time and effort into the manuscript and wants it treated with respect. For those of us who work indirectly with authors, the author’s anxiety about us is even greater. And because we work for publishers or packagers, the publishers and packagers also experience anxiety albeit at a much lesser level than authors. Their concern often revolves around how the author will perceive and receive the editor.

You put everyone at ease when you demonstrate your skills and communicate effectively. Perhaps more importantly, if you view queries as your opportunity to establish your credentials with the author and client, you will be more cautious in how you write them, which means that you are less likely to antagonize either the client or the author.

I recall a book I was asked to review after it had been edited because the author was angry over the editing and had spent a considerable amount of time both berating the inhouse production staff for having hired the editor and in correcting what the author perceived as editor errors.

As I went through the editing it became pretty clear that the editing was well done; the problem was the queries. They were written in such a manner as to convey the editor’s contempt for the author. I admit the author was somewhat lazy and that had I been the editor, I, too, would have been cursing the author — but the difference is that I would not have let those feelings permeate the queries: neither the author nor the client should ever think that I have anything but admiration for the author’s work.

The editor hadn’t comforted the author or the client nor had the editor marketed herself well. The author’s anger might be ratcheted down a bit, but both the author and the client will hesitate to use the editor again, and the author will let fellow authors know as well.

To Demonstrate Why I am The Editor

Presumably we are all well-skilled, well-qualified professional editors. Put us in a bag, shake us up, and pull one of us out at random and you should get a good quality editing job. But that doesn’t bring me any business, and bringing in business is the name of the game. (If you haven’t read it, let me recommend my book, The Business of Editing. It is not enough to have editing skills, you must always be thinking and acting like a business.)

I always have the need to bring in future business in mind, so when I edit I look at the editing as a way to impress my client, and I look at queries as the way to both impress and communicate what makes me The Editor — the editor to hire for future projects and the editor to recommend to colleagues. Well-crafted, informative queries (just like emails and online posts) are like a billboard advertising my skills. Cryptic, curt queries undermine the image of professionalism that I want to project.

This does not mean that every query needs to be five sentences long or a dissertation on grammar. It does mean that every query must satisfy these criteria:

• be on point, not meandering
• identifies the problem and offers an appropriate solution
• reinforces my skills and expertise as an editor
• reinforces the correctness of the decision to hire me
• declares clearly my status as a professional editor

Every query that I write that fulfills those criteria sets me apart from my competition and says I am The Editor.

EditTools’ Insert Query Macro

Because writing queries can be time-consuming, it is a good idea to build query templates that require minor modification based on the circumstance and project. That is the premise behind EditTools’ Insert Query macro. I have numerous “standard” queries that are saved to a dataset and that I can call up and modify for a particular project. In addition, each project has its own custom queries. By using the Insert Query macro, I can minimize the time I need to spend inputting a query and the opportunity for inputting error. It also means that I can use more detailed queries because I do not have to retype the same query innumerable times.

Consider this query:

AQ: Using this type of time reference allows the time to shift. The shift occurs because the reference was made when you were writing the text but doesn’t allow for either editing and production time until publication or for the book’s expected several-year shelf-life or for the passage of time between the writing of the text and when it is read by a reader. It would be better to write, for example, “since 2000” (substitute the appropriate year), so that the time reference always remains static.

How long would it take you to type this query? How many times would you care to do so? With EditTools’ Insert Query macro, I typed it once into the dataset and now can either use it as is or modify it as needed, taking seconds rather than minutes and avoiding typing errors.

To get the most out of queries, think of queries as marketing tools.

Richard Adin, An American Editor