RE: Six lessons for online editing tests using Microsoft Word? (T ake II)

["Hart, Geoff" <Geoff-H -at- MTL -dot- FERIC -dot- CA>]

Dick Margulis pointed out that authors don't always appreciate our edits:
<<I worked for five years at a composition house where our customers were
respected publishers of academic journals, engineering journals, scholarly
works, and textbooks. One would _think_ that the authors would want their
works to be error-free. However we got slapped more than once for "too many
queries," even though all the queries were carefully considered and correct
by any objective standard.>>

Fair enough. Different contexts, different authors, different responses. In
my experience, most authors (and particularly those who know they're going
to get their manuscripts bounced hard by a peer-reviewed journal if they
ignore your edits) are happy for any help you can give them, but I've
certainly met those who deeply resent being edited. I've also had several
chances over the years to say "I told you so" to clueless authors--though
most often, I just savored the notion of doing so and didn't actually say
anything.

<<On their limited budgets, they were not willing to pay for more than a
minimal number of author's alterations. If there were errors, so be it. Who
would know? The articles had made it through peer review without anyone
catching these little problems.>>

This is less of a problem if you edit for a fixed price, which I hate doing,
but reality is that clients increasingly want this. If they're paying you by
the hour, then you need to clearly establish from the start what edits they
want--and which ones you shouldn't bother with. As for the latter part of
your response, it's important to note that if the peer reviewers didn't spot
"little" problems, then these are problems that an editor should probably
learn to accept. I was talking more about substantive issues that peer
reviewers often don't spot, but didn't make this clear.

And before you ask, yes, I'm a subject matter expert in many of the areas I
edit, and that also lets me perform a technical review in many cases. I've
developed a measure of skepticism towards peer review precisely because of
the things I've caught slipping through peer reviews. For in-house editing,
I have the authority to overrule the authors on "little problems"; I don't
have this authority for freelance clients, and I neglected to make that
distinction.

<<You're just the damn printer... sometimes it was the reaction from the
authors themselves, whose view of the world did not permit of the idea that
a mere proofreader at a comp house could actually know anything.>>

Sometimes the fact that you can provide a documented example that they're
wrong (photocopied from a journal or dictionary or whatever) won't change
their minds. What can you do? You make your case as best you can, then in
the end, recognize that it's their book, not yours, and if you're lucky,
your name will never appear in the acknowledgments. Every editor learns this
trick eventually, hard though it sometimes is.

--Geoff Hart, geoff-h -at- mtl -dot- feric -dot- ca
Forest Engineering Research Institute of Canada
580 boul. St-Jean
Pointe-Claire, Que., H9R 3J9 Canada 
"User's advocate" online monthly at
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"A life spent making mistakes is not only more honorable,  but more useful
than a life spent doing nothing."--George Bernard Shaw

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