I am so glad to learn that Copy Editors still exist

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, copy editors, copy editing, punctuation, word usage, grammar, memoirs

Mary Norris is one of those wonderful people who make sure that "everything that's fit to print" is also "fit to read". Her 2015 book is Between You and Me: Confessions of a Comma Queen. She is a long-time copy editor for The New Yorker. One of her mentors actually had a "comma shaker", a decoration at her desk, to emphasize that the style favored by TNY incorporates plenty of commas, but not too many. A big bone of contention between different schools of copy editing is the serial comma. Some know it as the Oxford comma, apparently because at one time it was universally used in publications at Oxford (not so much, these days, I understand). 

And just what is this mysterious comma? It is the one used after "and" in a series such as "red, white, and blue". Most publications these days don't use it, preferring, "red, white and blue". However, while it is OK to leave the comma out of that particular list, consider the sentence, "The singer was accompanied by his two ex-wives, Kris Kristofferson and Waylon Jennings." Here, a comma before "and" would make it clear that the two men mentioned are not former wives of the famous singer! The list refers to four persons accompanying him.

So, copy editing. You might think the subject is going to be dull. I assure you, it is not. In this author's hands, it's delightful.

Any memoir begins with an obligatory chapter or two about one's early life. By the end of Chapter 1 the author has been accepted into the august halls of TNY, and she can get down to the business of regaling us with stories of solecisms and how they are exterminated…or not. Here we meet the formidable Lu Burke and her comma shaker, and others who guided Ms Norris's career, sometimes catching her slips, and sometimes grinning in chagrin when she catches one of theirs. Several pairs of eyes scrutinize a manuscript or galley proof before it ever hits print, the work's author (and often several friends and relatives), the intake editor (the one an author might think of as "My editor"), the typesetter (although these days most authors submit electronic text, sidestepping the typesetter), the copy editor, a supervising editor, and someone in the print shop who at least glances over the text while making sure the layout is proper.

Many of the details of a copy editor's job, as described throughout the book, are relevant to a time before word processing and the ubiquitous PDF file: Lots of hand markup, and markup of markup, and an author's "STET" where he or she doesn't want a certain change to be made (I had to do a ton of STET's while negotiating with a copy editor for a British journal, who tried to de-Americanize my text, while I wished to retain my own voice, not sounding like a warmed-over Brit). It isn't clear how does all these revisions and re-revisions electronically. I should ask my brother, who publishes a book every few years!

[For this image I had no success getting Playground/Stable Diffusion to show a comma shaker, but a different query popped out this kettle of question marks]

The author's career at TNY really began when she caught an error all others had missed: the word "flour" spelled as "flower". Homophones are hard to catch, and are so far impossible for "spell checkers" in software to detect. They're one big reason we still need copy editors. Some chapters are devoted to grammatical solecisms ("solecism" is the grammarian's term for "sin"). Others to punctuation marks and their use/misuse. She alternately rhapsodizes and agonizes over the way one must edit poems by Emily Dickinson, who used dashes of several lengths—sometimes half a line—in favor of most other punctuation. Opinions vary as to how many "buckets" to use for her dashes. The usual set, more than plenty for most of us, numbers four:

- Hyphen, also used for a preceding minus sign, sometimes.

– En dash (the width of a capital "N"), usually used for the minus sign; it's the same width as the +.

— Em dash (the width of a capital "M").

—— Long dash, which doesn't have a code in Unicode, but is entered as two Em dashes strung together. It runs the risk of the two Em dashes being separated at the end of a line.

Plus, there are rules at TNY about when to surround a dash with spaces, and when not to do so. Other punctuation marks that get lengthy treatment include the semicolon, colon and apostrophe. A few pages are devoted to dangling participles, such as, "Over tea in the greenhouse, her mood turned dark." It wasn't her mood that was hovering over the tea, so the sentence was rewritten, "As we drank tea in the greenhouse, her mood turned dark." That made it clear that one of the tea drinkers possessed the darkening mood (or was possessed by it).

In these reviews I have noted when I've found more than one or two evident errors in a book's text, and I have complained about the evident lack of competent copy editors (often, total lack…). I note that I have used an ellipsis (…) a couple of times. Ms Norris tells us of a writer who uses the ellipsis almost to the exclusion of other punctuation marks. I lends a breathless quality to the writing, and one hardly knows where to pause and recollect one's thoughts. It also leaves a copy editor quite unable to do much.

I cannot close without adding my 2¢ to the chapter on "you and me", which these days is so frequently replaced with "you and I", as in, "My brother called for you and I." Hardly anyone would write, "My brother called for I." Rather, we would write, "My brother called for me," which is the clue that the pronoun is the object of "called", not the subject. A side issue is that, while my generation was taught to always mention oneself last, that practice has also been gradually eliminated. Now we hear, "such-and-such happened to me and him," for which at least the pronouns are back in the correct (objective) case. I was taught that anything other than "…to him and me" is impolite. My 2¢? AMEN! The book ends with the author, at a memorial event for Lu Burke, having mentioned "Alice or me." Correct, right up to the finish.