Getting the Most Out of Your Editor

You’ve made the excellent decision to hire a professional editor for your writing, whether it’s a dissertation you want edited, novel, thesis, white paper, short story, or whatever, and you know this means you’ll be told about grammar and technical errors and get feedback on your content. But did you know you can get a lot more than that just by asking?

If you know a weak area in your writing, such as a tendency to write run-on sentences, trouble writing good dialogue, or problems with commas, tell your editor about it so they’ll know to give that extra attention from the beginning of the work.

Have a plot twist that you’re worried everyone will see coming? Say you want feedback on the plot twist (without giving it away).

Do you sometimes get a little wordy? Do you want to make sure everyone can follow your logic? Let the editor know.

One caveat here: don’t tell the editor that you want to make sure the symbolism of the rose to indicate a character’s heartache is clear because now they cannot judge. You’ve “given it away.” Don’t ask if they’re surprised by your use of Freud in discussing the family romance. They can’t be surprised now!

One of the most important things a professional editor can offer you is knowing the bare minimum about the text before they read it, just like a “regular” reader and not like a friend who’s been listening to you talk about it all week.

Mark Twain came up with the idea of using double-spacing to leave room for editorial comments. (Rumor says he later regretted it.) It helps the editor to see your text better. By the same token, don’t justify (i.e., line up) the right margin because this messes with the spaces between words and can obscure various errors.

Also, use a standard serif font. The go-to is Times New Roman 12 point. Even if it’s for a blog post that will ultimately be using Verdana or a fancy card that will apply Edwardian Script ITC, the editor will be used to TNR 12 pt. and will perform best with that or something similar.

Note: This is particularly good advice for those who intend to self-publish and want to use special fonts and spacing and the like. Wait until after the edit to do that.

Make sure you give your editor all the tools they need to do their job, and that includes the language you’re using. That seems straightforward for most of the 7,000 tongues out there, but US, UK, Canadian, and Singapore English differ in many ways. So do Australian and New Zealand. Don’t believe me? Look at the spellcheck language options in your Word document.

Styles are quite particular, and my goal is to give a little overview here to see how important a style choice is. In selecting a style, you’re indicating the genre of your work, the way your work will be judged, your intended audience, and many other things that editors find terribly helpful.

The main style choices are:

• The Chicago Manual of Style. This is the “bible” of the publishing industry and sets the standards for literally thousands of grammar, format, and mechanical issues and whose latest edition, the 17th, clocks in at 1,144 pages with itty bitty font. (Turabian Style is basically simplified Chicago.) Also, other style manuals rely on Chicago as the authority for things they don’t cover. Here are a few examples of Chicago style:
  • Put quotation marks around song/poem/short story titles, and use italics for movie, TV show, and book titles.
  • Splitting infinitives and ending sentences with prepositions are no longer grammatically incorrect.
  • Numbers that begin sentences are always spelled out.
  • Title capitalization means conjunctions and prepositions aren’t capitalized unless they’re the first or last word. Confused? There’s an online Chicago capitalization tool.
• The Associated Press Stylebook. This is the style for AP News, the New York Times, and all the rest. It differs in many ways from Chicago. Here are two examples:
  • AP puts quotation marks around all titles and doesn’t use italics. (Note that this comes from the limitations of early printing presses.)
  • Whereas Chicago spells out numbers up to a hundred, AP only spells them out to nine (unless they start a sentence).
• Publication Manual for the American Psychological Association (APA). This style is typically used for the “soft sciences,” such as sociology, anthropology, economics, and, yes, psychology. Its primary interests are citations and references, but it concerns basic text usage as well. Here are a few rules:
  • Whereas Chicago abbreviates “United States” as “US,” APA abbreviates it as “U.S.”
  • APA does not hyphenate several prefixes, including “sub,” “non,” and “post,” unless it creates a word that is difficult to read, like “preintervention.”
  • APA title capitalizes all words with 4+ letters.
• The Council of Science Editors Manual. This style is used exclusively for the “hard sciences,” like mathematics, physic, chemistry, and biomedical engineering, and it’s mostly interested in citations and references (defaulting to Chicago otherwise). Though it offers three different citation systems, it prefers a numbered approach, and the references are done with abbreviated journal titles you can look up here.
• Modern Language Association Handbook. Ah, my old stomping grounds for English majors and others in the humanities. While MLA doesn’t differ from Chicago all that much, it’s quite different from APA, particularly in that MLA wants the author to give their conclusions up front, such as, “The Great Gatsby is an ode to the Jazz Age,” not, as in APA, “This paper will show that The Great Gatsby is an ode to the Jazzy Age.”
• There’s a plethora of other styles. IEEE citation style is used primarily for electronics, engineering, CS, and IT. Harvard style is for lawyers and includes citation goodies like the applicable jurisdiction and the section or regulation number. Also, many individual journals, universities, publishing houses, and websites have their own styles, such as Wikipedia, which uses an odd hodge-podge of Chicago, APA, and CSE.

I’ve gone into so much detail about styles not to dazzle you with my editorial knowledge (well, maybe just a little), but to demonstrate that formal style choice is critical when you’re looking to get graded, published, or even just taken seriously. The styles are geared toward the content. APA cares most who said something and when. MLA cares about the page number where the reader can find that quote. Chicago cares about offering up a standard that encompasses all manner of texts and situations. AP cares about featuring the what, why, when, where, who, and how of the article.

Telling your editor what style you’re using gives them much more than the manual to consult. You’re identifying your type of writing, your intended audience, and the use you want to put your writing to.

And if you don’t know your appropriate style? Just ask. The editor can help you.

An editor can do many things, but they can’t read your mind. Even if you don’t know all about your style or your grammar isn’t PhD-level, take the time to set your work aside for a little while and then come back and read it as objectively as possible. You’ll probably find sentences that trail off without making a point, words you didn’t mean to type (My fingers like to type “solider” for “soldier” for some reason.), missing words, doubled words (i.e., the the) and so on.

And now I’m going to say something that will get me booed by some in my profession. At this point, go ahead and use Grammarly.com and Word’s spellcheck. Just don’t take their word for gospel, and don’t be surprised when your professional editor disagrees with them. They catch a lot of mistakes, but they also make a lot of mistakes.

I’ve been confronted by more than one client about my “too-harsh” criticism, but I try to explain they’re paying me to be objective, not friendly. If you’ve put your heart and soul into something, why would you show it to a stranger first? See if you can get friends, family members, or a classmate to look it over first so they can offer you encouragement and point out things they like.

You’re paying an editor to point out mistakes. They aren’t supposed to grade your work or put it on the ‘fridge for all to admire, even if they think your work is great.

A good editor will point out the times when you’ve done something really well so that you can see what you did right and repeat it elsewhere, but they’re much more focused on catching mistakes, making sure you’re following the stylebook, and helping your work shine.

You pay an editor to be objective. Make sure you’re ready for it first.

A professional edit shouldn’t be something you order up an hour before the paper is due, especially if it’s your first edit for that manuscript. Your editor may call for important and major revisions. They may ask you questions about your assumptions or research methodology. They may be uncertain about the meaning you intend and offer different suggestions.

A good edit is part of the process, not a last-minute wash-and-wax. An editor is part of your writing arsenal. Leave time to use their work to its fullest.

In short, a good editor wants you to succeed. Give them what they need to help you the most.