Tuesday, July 21, 2015

In praise of copy editors …

… The Better Angels of Our Writing — Advice — The Chronicle of Higher Education. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

I loved learning that the prose of John Updike, Pauline Kael, Mark Singer, and Ian Frazier arrived so polished that Norris couldn’t believe she was getting paid to read their manuscripts. I loved knowing that she’s "lazy" and finds it easer to use the serial comma consistently rather than stop every time to decide if a comma is needed.

Years ago, I did some copyediting for the J.B. Lippincott Co. One of the books I was assigned was Stanley I. Kutler's Privilege and Creative Destruction. It was a completely clean manuscript. I was paid, basically, for just reading it

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