Tuesday, February 27, 2007
three hours on six pages
I am ashamed to admit, but I must have spent about three hours copyediting test #2. What frustrated me was it seemed that the author took no more than an hour to write the piece. In an actual work environment, wouldn't it be more economical to ask the author to take another hour to rewrite instead of having a copyeditor spend hours trying to fix the work?
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
3 comments:
If I feel that something is so badly written that it will require an extraordinary amount of copyediting, I discuss it with the head of MANOA, Frank. It is up to him to decide what to do. The copyeditor cannot ask the author to rewrite his or her work.
As I said in class, copyediting is a tedious, thankless task. Once in a great while, you will be rewarded; but most of the time, you will have to console yourself with the knowledge that you have practiced your craft to the best of your ability.
Dear Lily,
If I may add something: it always takes much less time to break something---or to make it badly---than it does to fix it or make it well in the first place. It should not surprise you now that many teachers of Freshman Comp. spend far more time marking each paper than it too the student to write it (sometimes). I, too, wish that authors would spend more time getting their final draft as correct as possible before handing it over to a copy editor.
Cheers,
Frank Stewart
Hi, it's Frank again.
Obviously I am a terrible proof reader, as you will have noticed by my last post. : (
I think good proof readers are gods.
Post a Comment