I've been working on a manuscript for the past few weeks that has had some, shall we say, "challenges" when it comes to punctuation. There have been a lot of commas. And ellipses that go on for seven or eight "dots." (Though - unlike the manuscript before this one, the ellipses were used in the proper places, instead of at the end of every line of dialogue.) These are all pretty standard things to fix, though, and - in the case of the comma usage - can truly depend on the author's "voice" and writing style. Consequently, until I'm truly comfortable in the manuscript, I don't go about willy-nilly getting rid of commas. What finally got me, though, was a question about commas that came through
As an editor, I see a little of everything when I'm working with authors. I see the authors who want to keep everything as "real" and "gritty" as possible (in other words, they swear a lot and graphically describe sex and violence), and I see authors who apparently don't want to offend anyone (so they censor out everything). Here's my take on this: Use what works for your book. It seems easy enough, right? It's not - at least for many authors. You see, authors tend to put themselves into their books. Sometimes, this is great, because it means that we can get honest reactions to situations. I can totally imagine some of my authors sitting at their computers running through scenarios from star
All of us have our pet peeves. They range from "people who drive slowly in the fast lane" to "flowers that only bloom during the one week while you're on vacation" and all sorts of things in the middle. Editors are no exception. Yes, we follow style guides that give us the basic (and not-so-basic) rules for how material is supposed to be presented. And we lean on dictionaries a lot to confirm spellings and proper usages of words. And we think about how our English teachers explained grammar and usage to us all those years ago. Then, once we have all of that in hand, we go out and apply it to what we're editing. But, in the same way that we need to figure out the author's own style, we also t
