#4 on the list of vital matters: copy editing.
I am not so fond of my copy editors as I am my editors. I've had some great ones; I've had some not so great ones. But they're still necessary.
Here is my hard-and-fast, never-bend, never-break rule number one for any kind of publishing: Words should be spelled properly, sentences should be punctuated properly, and words should be used properly.
We are
writers. Words are our stock in trade. At the very least, we owe it to our
readers to know how to spell them, punctuate and use them. Can you imagine a
surgeon who doesn't bother to learn how to use a scalpel or saw? A cashier who
can ring up your order but can't make change? A bus driver who's great with
Drive and Reverse but hasn't figured out Stop?
I believe
it's fair to say that Americans' ability to spell and punctuate has gone downhill
over the last three generations, particularly with the popularity of the
Internet. Sloppiness rules. Can't spell a word? Close is good enough. The
biggest English nerd in the world can't diagram the messes that pass for your
sentences? oh well, lol. When you want to have a career as a professional writer, close is not good enough. LOL doesn't cut it. You need to know all that boring stuff you turned out in school about sentence structure, grammar, spelling, etc. And if you won't or can't learn it yourself, you need someone who does know it: a copy editor.
Don't assume because you don't know where the commas go, your readers don't, either. A lot of us do. A lot of us know that carpicious and capacious aren't interchangeable. A lot of us know that as a general rule, sentences require nouns and verbs and action and that there are standard forms for their structure.
And a lot of us are getting really tired of reading books where the author didn't care enough to present us with her absolute best work.
Google copy editors with a body of work to back up their claiming the title. Hire a retired persnickety English or compostion teacher. Memorize Strunk & White. Clean up that book before you publish it.
{My apologies for the change in fonts here. I've edited this post a dozen times, and whatever code is causing the problem is well hidden from me. Ironic, huh?)
