The Reader: Always on My Mind

When I answer my phone and I suspect it's one of my clients on the other end of the line, I answer with a cheerful, "Hello, this is Betsy." ("Yo! Go for Betsy!" seems a little casual.) This makes it easier for my clients to skip the step of "May I speak to..." and it's always helpful for someone to know exactly who is on the other end of the line. Even my voice mail greeting is a quick, simple, "This is Betsy. Sorry I missed you." [beep]. No one needs to be reminded to leave a message anymore. And no one needs to be promised that you will call him back. Callers just want to know, whom am I leaving this message for?

In our writing, this question should be one of our first considerations. When we publish, we are leaving a message for people, and we need to know who they are. That's why one of the first things I say to a new client in an initial get-to-know-you discussion is "Tell me about the person who is going to read this."

Why is it important to keep a reader in mind as you move along in your writing process?

Simply put, because

everything

has to be

translated.

Maybe you think there's no translation going on with your writing unless it's being changed into another language. As long as you are writing in English for English-speaking readers, you might not imagine that translation is happening. Keep in mind, though, that even language itself is a translation. Our brains run on glucose, not phonics.

When you write, your ideas (thought pictures) are being translated into words (sound pictures), which will then be translated again by the reader into her own ideas. In addition, she is building on these pictures herself as she reads, translating and altering, interpreting and recomposing, as she fixes her eyes on your words and new thoughts emerge in her mind. Every new thought picture is a mixture of 1) what you were trying to translate into words, and 2) what she brought with her in her mind before she ever picked up your document. Nothing is ever purely translated. Nothing. Because we are complex creatures. If you want your writing to always be translated perfectly, you probably should take up computer programming.

So while content and syntax, yes, are the bread-and-butter of your work, always keep in mind that someone is going to be digesting that bread-and-butter.

Bread = content. Butter = syntax. Editing = yumminess.

And, to complicate things further, consider this: What is really communicated to readers is something even deeper than words and even deeper than pictures. Something even harder to measure...emotions.

Emotions like frustration are what we want to to avoid at all costs in academic and technical nonfiction. For instance, when you describe an esoteric term in simpler language, remember that your reader is building a picture in her mind. Use shorter sentences with uncomplicated subjects and predicates so she can build one part of the picture at a time. When you are explaining a concept with which you anticipate your reader will be familiar, you can use longer, more intriguing sentences. When you label a graph, don't force the reader back to the text again and again to understand your main point. If she feels like you are wasting her time, she won't be motivated to trust you in the next chapter.

Emotions like delight and pleasure, of course, should fill our writing. There's no reason not to build pleasure into the most technical of documents. Start by eliminating frustration; anticipate a reader's question and answer it for him. If the text allows for it, answer it in such a way that he learns something interesting, perhaps even about himself, in the process. Say something respectfully self-deprecating at a surprising moment in the text. Make a connection between a drab concept and a pleasant part of everyday life. Care enough about the reader to make his reading adventuresome.

What is Esoteric?

Let's assume that you are one of my many brilliant clients, and you are trying to present your great ideas to a public audience. One of your priorities is going to be alter esoteric language. Also known as specialist language, it's the terms and ideas that you and your colleagues are used to throwing around but that might not be as familiar to your readers.

Here's a rule of thumb: if a word or phrase can be looked up in the dictionary and the reader can fully understand your message, then it's not too esoteric for the public audience. It might be a bit advanced or even highbrow, but it needn't necessarily be changed.

If, however, a reader needs a college degree in your subject (or even needs to Google a term and then spend thirty minutes reading about it) in order to understand your meaning, then it's too esoteric for the general public.

Please, by all means, use the word or phrase. But take a sentence or two or five to explain it in simple terms. I can help.

My First International Project

Just released: Natural Law, Economics, and the Common Good. I learned a lot while working with many different scholars from around the world to help bring together a unified, coherent text. (If you read it and see a lot of terminal punctuation outside of quotation marks and single quote marks instead of double . . . it's because it's published in the UK. Don't judge.)  :-)

It was a real honor to work with editors Samuel Gregg and Harold James, and to assist editorial director Alicia Brzycki at the Witherspoon Institute.

A Recent Accolade

As Scripture might have said, "A gifted editor—who can find her? She is more precious than pearls." That's our Betsy!

—Robert P. George

McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence, Princeton University

Read more recommendations from past clients here. 

Citations: Styling vs. Verifying

I have been styling and verifying a lot of citations lately for a particularly heady document, and it occurred to me that it might benefit my clients to fully understand the differences between these two tasks.


Styling citations (whether they be in footnotes, endnotes, a bibliography, or a works-cited list) is different from verifying them. When I style your citations, I'm making them conform to a particular style guide. For instance, the folks at Oxford University Press want the citations in their books styled a certain way, while the Journal of the American Medical Association has its own unique citation style, too. When I style citations for a client, then, I'm just preparing them for publication and making sure no elements are missing from them.

Verifying citations means that I am checking them for errors. I find the original document's information in one of the databases to which I am subscribed and usually am able to view the cover to check for title, subtitle, and author names. I check page ranges of chapters by looking at the table of contents for each book. Or I search for the journal article through a database and verify its information that way. We editors have all kinds of magical resources.

So when I verify citations for your document, you can count on my checking the accuracy of each of these elements:

• book, article, and journal titles (including spelling and other details of the title),
• subtitles (adding them if missing),
• author names (as they are listed on the cover),
• publishing companies and their locations,
• dates of publication,
• page ranges of book sections such as chapters, and
• page ranges of articles within a journal or other periodical.

If I'm ever not able to verify one of these, I will clearly mark it on your document so that you'll know it wasn't verified.

What I don't verify are page numbers of quotations you pull into your document. So be careful to check these yourself. I also can't verify the accuracy of most quotations, so if a quotation looks squirrelly to me—that's Southern for not quite right—I might flag it for you to look up again from your source and double check. Lastly, when I verify a publication date for a book, I'm verifying that this book was in fact published, in some edition somewhere, in that year. There's no way for me to know, naturally, if you wrote down the date wrong ("1967" rather than "1976") and so the page number of the quotation would apply to a different edition.

A High-profile Publication Begins With a Good Edit

Yesterday, Brad Wilcox (director of the National Marriage Project) released a report about how the Great Recession has affected marriages in America. Today, it's already being disseminated in outlets ranging from the Wall Street Journal and Washington Post online editions to the blog of Illinois Family Law and Deseret News of the LDS Church.

But before it saw any of these outlets, I saw it on my desk. I fixed mistakes, rearranged a few sentences, and double-checked the charts to make sure they made sense. Because no matter the brilliance of the author, everybody misses some details. And you never know when your publication (along with any errors that might have snuck in) will spread like wildfire.

Applying My Editor's Marks

When clients receive a marked-up text from me—either by a true hard copy or, more often, from a scanned-in and emailed file—they always have the option of applying the changes themselves to their electronic document. See a bit more about this at "How Does the Editing Process Work?"

Editor's marks can be confusing if you're not used to reading them. I always recommend that you set aside at least as much time as I took to edit the document for you to make the changes, especially if this is your first time applying electronic changes ("e-changes"). However, doing your own e-changes to a document can save you some money and can also give you a greater measure of control over your text, having the chance to "OK" everything as you go.

Tips for Applying E-changes

Don't skip anything just because you don't understand it. If I marked it, I did it for a reason, and it might be really important.

Don't hesitate to call me with quick questions about editing marks. If you are an established client (meaning I've completed billable work for you), I am always happy to answer questions about anything you don't understand.

Do look closely at where that little deletion line goes. (There's more about this below.) If it strikes through a comma, for instance, that comma should be deleted. If it stops right before it or starts right after it, then the comma is supposed to stay. Again, nothing is marked haphazardly, no matter how chaotic it might look at first.

Do work from a hard copy (print out any emailed scans) rather than reading the marks from a screen. This will save time, headaches, and lots of missed changes. Keep a highlighter handy, and neatly highlight changes on your hard copy as you make them on the screen. This is how the pros do it—for good reason.

Do let me know if there is a change that you think is just plain stupid. It might be my error (it happens), but it might be a necessary change that I just didn't communicate clearly.

Some Marks and Their Application

First, there's the ever-useful caret. It always points precisely to the place in the text where a change should be inserted. It just means to insert whatever is written above it:

Or sometimes below it:

So that brings us to that clever little mark that ends with a loop. That means to delete. In the above example, the "s" is to be deleted and replaced by the "ed."

Sometimes you have to be very careful not to miss something that is supposed to be deleted.

Deleting the "for" and the "that" and the "it provides them" is obvious in this example. But did you notice that the comma after "do" is also supposed to be deleted? Editors are careful (or should be) as to where that little line goes. Everything it cuts through should be deleted. It's a very powerful squiggle.

Curves vs. Angles

Sometimes the editor will write a note in the margin that shouldn't be inserted in the text but is rather a suggestion or question for the writer. These notes will be circled—or at least outlined in something like a circle, with curved edges.

Text that is to be inserted, however, if it is outlined at all, will be outlined with angled corners. Below, the first sample shows an insertion change. The next sample is a suggestion to the writer (I am questioning his use of "embellished").

A Few More Editor's Marks

Underlined text should be italicized. (We don't use actual underlining—called "underscore"—in printed text unless a certain style calls for it.)

Text that is underlined with a strike through the line should have the ital removed.

Text underlined three times should be set in capital letters.

Text with a diagonal line through it (without the "delete" squiggle at the end of the line) should be set in lowercase letters.

Some Abbreviations

Like in the example above, "WC" means word choice. I'll use it when I'm questioning whether you might have used the wrong word but I want to verify that I am retaining your intended meaning.

"Per" in my notes to you means "according to." Such as in "This is a misquote per quotes.com. Verify at your source."

"Nom" means number: "Insert page nom here."

"#" actually doesn't mean "number" in editor's marks. It represents a space. So if you see a caret inserting a "#," that means to put a space there.

Circled Text

When something in your text is circled with no other explanation, it usually means that it should be spelled out. If a "%" in circled, it should be replaced with the word "percent." If "U.S." is circled, replace it with "United States." You get the idea.

However, a circled number means that the number should be made superscript (such as in a footnote number). If a number is to be spelled out as a word (such as "20" to "twenty"), I'll just spell it out for you.

Sometimes if I am making a change over and over again, I'll write "circled hereafter" following the first few changes, and then I'll just circle where the change needs to happen. For instance, if a client keeps spelling "Dr. Seuss" as "Dr. Suess," then, I'll just correct it the first few times, write "circled hereafter" in the margin, and simply circle the misspelling from then on.

Large portions of circled text are probably supposed to be moved to somewhere else in the text. I'll note this clearly in the margin.

Three Horizontal Lines and Why We Love Them

A mark that looks like a little horizontal line means to insert a hyphen. We all know what these are. You insert it with the button usually situated to the right of the zero across the top of your keyboard. Hyphens connect unit modifiers, help us create new funky-monkey word structures, and generally make life more fun. When it comes to feeling good about prefixes, they are definitely pro-self-esteem punctuation.

A little fraction mark that looks like a "1" over an "m" means to insert an M-dash. On a mac, you insert it with a shift+option+hyphen. These dashes are used within sentences to set off a phrase less severely than with parentheses.

A little fraction mark that looks like a "1" over an "n" means to insert . . . an N-dash. You guessed it. These dashes are sometimes used in the place of a hyphen (for various reasons) but are usually used to indicate a range of something, as in "employed adults aged 25–40" or "I referenced pages 33–49."

For other tips, check out Merriam Webster's table of proofreader's marks.