As Per

The phrase "as per" is common, but it is grammatically incorrect. "Per" means "according to," so you would say "Per our conversation," not "As per our conversation."

Chicago Manual

I thought you might be interested in reading what one reviewer of the latest edition of Chicago Manual has to say about it. The article appeared in Slate.

My thanks to David for sending the link.

The Copyeditor's Goal

Chapter four discusses the editor's role in technical terms. However, what is the copyeditor's ultimate goal? Overall, what does the copyeditor strive to do through the first, second, and third edits? I was wondering if the copyeditor strives for perfection. Or if, perhaps, it's something more realistic or practical, such as clarity or readability. Maybe we hope to polish a rough stone. But do we hope to make it perfect?

Consistency

A friend of mine who works in advertising told me a story about consistency. He missed an error in a piece of copy that went out in an e-mail. The copy was slated to be reproduced in a variety of forms across a number of web sites and e-mails. Instead of fixing the error in the reproductions he and the rest of the account team decided that the mistake should stay, feeling consistency to be more important than correctness. Let me add that the mistake was barely noticeable. I think it was an extra space around em-dashes, or something like that.

Now in chapter 4 the book states, "Sometimes, consistency rules." I guess I'd like your take on qualifying the "sometimes" in that sentence. In my friends story the break in consistency would have likely drawn more attention than the error he missed. But readers might accept more egregious errors if they kept consistently reappearing. Do you have any examples that might serve as a guide? How are decisions like the one in my example reached at publications?

DK

research responsibilities

Part of the copyediting tasks listed in Ch. 4 discuss researching missing information (#20, p.59). How much research is usually expected of a copyeditor when an issue arises, and at what point do you query and leave it to the author to fix?

(from Rebecca)

reformating

I also had a question about format. The book says that copyeditors aren't responsible for rewriting or reformat issues. So if the piece needs extensive reformatting - maybe one big paragraph that would be served better in the form of a list or with bullets - would you just make a note and send it back to the writer to do? I just read through an article for a friend and planned to copyedit, but I ended up changing the format and it was so extensive that I don't know if I could have added all the marks needed in the space. Would you just squeeze them in however you could?

semicolons to commas

I remember going over changing punctuation by just making the correction (ie: turning a period into a colon by adding the other dot and perhaps circling it for clarity). However, in Exercise 6, paragraph 4, where they are changing the semicolons to commas, they just include the caret over the semicolon. Is that supposed to mean just cover the dot with your mark, therefore making it a comma with a caret over it? The second one still has the dot visible - is that the standard that the typesetter would just know to change to a comma because of the marking?