The Edit – a linguistic killing machine

By Ashleigh Hudson, Global Distribution – Sovereigns.

Alexander had always been very proud of his English, be it his correct grammar, his punctuation, his finickiness with autocorrects reversing the -ize for -ise and even lecturing me to use ‘autumn’ instead of ‘fall’.

“It is because it’s my second language, he would say, so I have learnt it correctly.”

So, the large number of proposed corrections in the first copy edit came as a thorough shock to him and provided much amusement for me!

The editors sent through a copy of their ground rules with notes on listing, gapping, joining and bracketing commas; hyphens, em and en dashes; capitalisation; colons and semi-colons; the list went on.

“You know my English has gone totally downhill since I started to work with you, North Americans,” I heard him say many times by way of excuse.

However, Alexander’s greatest annoyance came as he had to delete any song lyrics or recent quotes for copyright reasons - ones he had added for ambience and meaning.

“It seems you can scrape whole works for AI generated text but not use a flattering repeat of a short sequence of words from a lyric of 50 years ago!”

Each proposed correction needed to be approved, and everything then rechecked before the script was type-cast and the whole process repeated a number of times again.

“I honestly feel that I’ve now memorised that book,” he muttered despondently one evening.

But I sensed the whole process was providing some sort of masochistic joy, like a pensioner trying to make sense of his own student notes. He pored over the grammar ground rules and The Economist style guide.  It was the most exuberance I had seen from Alexander since the start of the publication process.

“I can’t believe I even managed to spell the names of some of the characters inconsistently across the chapters,” he mocked self-depreciatingly.

The biggest joy came from seeing the first typecast proof. “It really looks like a book now!” Alexander gasped.

Despite hours of effort, the first readers reverted with a handful of errors that had slipped through. A particularly esoteric book club pointed out that you can have orcas or killer whales, but not orca whales.

Just before publication Alexander sent me a photo of an article from The Economist about politics in Sao Paulo in Brazil, circling in red an alternative spelling for the location of the correspondent – Sao Paolo!

“Maybe too many North Americans in their editorial team”, I said, smiling to myself.