How are you promoting your copyediting services to the local business community? In this post, Embark founder Lorna Walsh explains how the $35 she spent to attend a meeting at the Pasadena Chamber of Commerce might be the best investment she made in her career this year. I HAD NEVER BEEN TO A CHAMBER OF COMMERCE MEETING BEFORE. In my imagination, such gatherings comprised (mostly) men in suits talking about zoning laws and the impact of the minimum wage. So, when I showed up for a 7:00 a.m. breakfast meeting, I was somewhat skeptical as to how much benefit I would get from it. What I found, however, dispelled my preconception. Serious Networking There was to be no loitering self-consciously by the coffee urn until it was time to leave. The woman at the check-in desk immediately introduced me to a chamber member who took me under her wing. I imagined we would choose a table and chat with whomever happened to be sitting there. But it quickly became clear that the networking wasn’t going to be casual. Each table had a designated host, who immediately kicked off a round-table introduction. Everyone had a minute to explain the nature of their enterprise and share business cards. Then, before I had a chance to take my first spoonful of oatmeal, everyone was invited to the front of the room in quick succession to deliver a 20-second pitch. While I was figuring out how best to my pitch my business, Ideal Type LLC, I gleaned that the membership of the Chamber consisted of freelancers, start-ups, small businesses, nonprofits, and corporations: all potential clients. I don’t recall exactly what I said during my brief stint at the podium (public speaking is not my forte), but the terrifying experience taught me a valuable lesson: have an elevator pitch ready for your freelance business, because you never know when and where you’ll need to give it. Having heard everyone’s pitches, attendees were invited to announce with whom they wanted to connect before they left the event and why. I was bold enough to stand and identify two people. The first was from a nonprofit, and, when I spoke with him afterwards, he was excited to learn about the Embark Editorial Agency’s pro bono service. However, I struck the mother lode with the second contact I made that morning. As luck would have it, the sponsor of that meeting was a publishing company that specializes in producing business books, and the people I talked to were interested in my freelance services. Bingo! Luck & Persistence I dutifully followed up with both contacts that same week. Nothing came of my conversation with the nonprofit, but within the week I had an informal interview with two employees from the publishing company. It went well, and I was promised work. Was it really that easy? Sadly, not: there was no copyediting work for me at that time. But over the next few months, I kept in contact with occasional emails. Just when I was losing hope, I received an email from the company asking if I was interested in ghostwriting. I can’t say I jumped at the chance, because I honestly had no idea what ghosting involved. But I was curious and open-minded. Ghostwriting comes in various forms; read this article by Andrew Crofts for some additional insight into the subject. But, as it turned out, ghosting for that particular publisher is what I would define as heavy copyediting (if you’ve taken the last in the UCBX sequence, you’ll know what I mean by that). The job is not to write new material. Rather, the ghost works with existing transcripts of spoken presentations to better organize the information, add transitions and headers, eliminate redundancy, recast sentences when necessary, and generally ensure the text is correct, concise, consistent, and cohesive. I produced a sample chapter for the publisher, had a follow-up phone interview, and boom! I’m a ghost! The Take Away The key lesson here is to get involved in your local business community somehow. People favor doing business with people they’ve met, and more so with people who are members of the same club (think of a Chamber of Commerce as Freemasonry without the funny aprons). The Pasadena Chamber of Commerce has meetings that are open to nonmembers, so check out the schedule of your local chapter. There may be other professional groups, too; check out Meetup.com for what’s happening in your area. I also recommend that you join the Freelancers Union and attend its local networking events (joining is free and so are many events). But whatever you do, be ready with professional business cards, a professional website, an irresistible pitch, and an open mind. Though the Agency doesn’t provide content editing services, sometimes an author will request feedback. Ideally, content issues should be dealt with before copyediting begins, but flexibility is often needed when working with authors who self-publish. In this post, Embark copyeditor Jaime R. shares her recent experience of going above and beyond the call of duty for a fiction writer. WHEN IT COMES TO EDITING FICTION, there are many aspects to consider. There are not only characters with their own flaws and personalities but also worlds vastly different from our own, characters story arcs as well as the overall story’s beginning, middle, and end. My most recent copyediting project allowed me to go further into content editing to help the author create the best reader experience possible. THE EDIT LETTER Carol Fisher Saller tells us her recipe for constructing a letter to the author, and in her view, there is no right way to compose an edit letter; each one is different. But writing a detailed edit letter for the first time allowed me to see for myself what type of information would be better served in an edit letter. Through a letter, the editor can explain issues more thoroughly than a simple copyediting query. Queries are meant for quick minor issues; the edit letter is where we delve into the nitty gritty. In this particular project, the edit letter separated the content issues from the copyediting of the manuscript itself. READING GLASSES, NOT A MICROSCOPE In this case, the letter was used to call the author’s attention to character flaws that needed to be addressed, complications of having two climaxes, and continuity issues that arose in multiple locations that could potentially lead to reader confusion. To do this, I had to read the piece through the lens of a regular reader, not the magnifying glass that an editor uses. The letter not only enabled me to describe in detail how the issue impacted the story but also to supply suggestions for resolving these issues. Of course, the letter included page numbers where the author could easily locate these issues. COPY V. CONTENT How do we know the difference between copyediting issues and content issues? Copyediting is what we usually think of when we are correcting grammar, fixing wordy sentences, and cutting redundancies. The copyediting issues that arose in this project were as follows:
In this piece, there were many foreign words, not all of them translated and not all spelled correctly. Chicago’s method of italicization followed by the English translation in parentheses looked awkward. It seemed more appropriate that the author used her words to give a vivid description of what the word meant and guide the reader naturally to the translation within the prose. Content editing is a little less straightforward, and it’s somewhat of a gray area for copyediting that can border on line editing. The content issues that were pointed out in the letter about this piece were those that would affect the reader experience:
ACCENTUATE THE POSITIVE! The one thing that we always need to remember when writing our edit letters is to use tact. Don’t lose sight of the fact that this story took the author a lot of time to create, and while it’s easy for us to point out what needs to change, be mindful that the author might get overwhelmed by critiques. My best friend is an author, and he struggles with the back and forth of feeling that he’s a great writer and then that he’s a terrible one. We can certainly help our authors feel better about their work if we mention things we find interesting or funny, for example. Copyediting.com’s Erin Brenner even discusses how some editors use emoticons to help put their authors at ease. It certainly does not hurt to tell the author where they did a good job. And, sometimes we are so focused on our job that we forget to let the author know that we appreciate them for choosing us. On this project, I'm happy to say that the client was the kind of enthusiastic author we all want to work with. She was completely open to any suggestions that I had for her and was excited to see what our combined efforts produced for her final piece. When you're writing or editing copy, do you consider yourself a technician or an artist? In this post, writer and Embark editor Norman R. encourages us to think of a screen as a canvas and our keyboard as a palette. If you have any views about the artistry of wordsmithing, let Norman know in the comments! AS YOU READ THE LATEST PULITZER PRIZE NOVEL, you might think, “Hey, this author’s a real artist.” We often associate writing with art. What about copyediting? Or editing in more general terms? Is there an artistic dimension to this craft? Art takes patience, precision, and intentionality. How much of this mind-set do writers and editors share? WRITE LIKE A PAINTER When I write, I see myself as a painter. I have my white canvas in front of me and a rough idea of what I want to communicate inside me. Then I start filling the page with all these ideas, without paying any attention either to their form or their organization. Letters, words, sentences, and paragraphs start unfolding on the page … until a picture develops. You can tell by my naïve concept of the painting process that I’m less than an amateur painter. But I’m fascinated by that process, and I was recently at the Museo Reina Sofía in Madrid, where I admired Pablo Picasso’s Guernica (1937) -- see picture. The exhibit preceding the painting is loaded with expectation and suspense: before a visitor enters the room where the masterpiece is displayed, several other rooms show all the smaller studies Picasso made beforehand. Observing all the different versions of Picasso’s studies for the Guernica made me think of Katharine O’Moore-Klopf’s copyediting process. At the top of her to-do list she places two actions:
EDIT LIKE A SCULPTOR Form is crucial. Thanks to form, we can immediately recognize the text in front of us as a poem, a magazine article, or a caption. But how do we get to that form? When I edit copy, I feel like a sculptor. I have a block of words in front of me that needs shape: sometimes I’ve got to chip away at it before the message emerges in all its clarity and power; sometimes it just needs some gentle polishing. However, I need to be careful not to modify the author’s message. When I first started copyediting, I thought of an old Italian story, summed up in the saying, “Because of a period, Martino lost his cowl.” The story involves a sixteenth-century Tuscan abbot, Martino from Asello, who wanted to decorate the entrance to his monastery with the words, Porta patens esto. Nulli claudatur honesto, which means “Let the door always open. Do not close the door to the honest man.” Unfortunately, when he carved the sentences on the marble lintel, he wrote: Porta patens esto nulli. Claudatur honesto, which translates to: “Do not let the door open for anybody. Close it down to the honest man.” Because of the misplaced period, Abbot Martino not only made a gaffe but also lost his office. Luckily for us, words are not set in stone. COMPOSE LIKE A MUSICIAN Finally, when I write and edit, I am like a musician. When I have all the words on the page in front of me, I like to play around with punctuation to change the rhythm and style of the sentence and the paragraph, try new combinations and new sentence structures. When I work on other writers’ texts, I listen carefully to their voices, understand the rhythm of their speech, and savor the flow of their messages. Rhythm is at the core of the writing-editing process for Stephen King as well. He dedicates the final section of his memoir On Writing to an example of his editing process, in which he shows both the rough and the edited versions of a short story. King explains that most of his edits are “intended to speed the story;” that is, they involve matters of rhythm. HARMONY Though King claims he works alone, I like to believe that writers understand how to express their ideas better through the dialogues they have with their copyeditors. And by working on several kinds of texts and interacting with several authors, copyeditors can learn how to be flexible with grammar and how to communicate in different ways. By interacting with each other, writers and editors learn how to see the world with somebody else’s eyes. This is the way art also challenges us, and it’s a tough challenge: are you willing to accept it and embark on this journey? From fashion to travel, from lifestyle to opinion, blogging is a boom industry. Embark is growing its new-blogger client list to help writers ensure they're word perfect and help new editors explore this unique type of publishing. In this new post, Embark editor Sandra D. explains how you can help your client be a better blogger. Photo credit: Pixabay, Creative Commons Blogging takes work. And editing a blog post takes work too, especially as a new copyeditor who likes working with paper! Preparing content for an online audience and becoming media savvy has been a learning curve for me in many ways, which I’d like to share with my fellow Embark editors. I have been privileged to collaborate with Brien Crothers, who blogs about his adventure travels over at Grandpa’s Gone Again? His experiences are remarkable, and he encourages readers to follow his example and experience the world for themselves. He also provides helpful training advice for readers new to adventure travel. Showcase Your Blogger’s Voice As I’ve embarked on this blogging journey alongside my client, I’ve found that there’s quite a difference between a grammatically correct blog post that is boring to read and one that is artfully written—that pulls in readers from the beginning. I make heavy use of Chicago, Merriam-Webster, and other editing resources as I help my client craft grammatical blog posts. However, bridging the gap from a merely informative article to an engaging one draws upon both Brien’s and my sense of verbal style and our combined media savvy. Incorporating verbal style into a post is an aspect of blog editing I particularly enjoy. It has been fun to collaborate with my client in presenting his story in a compelling, artful way. I always try to showcase Brien’s unique voice: his conviction that the benefits of traversing the world’s many wonders (many times on foot!) is a challenge worth pursuing. The initiation process to blogging has also taught me some things about what makes a blog “sell.” While well‐chosen words are crucial, there are other important features that any successful blog needs. Among these are an outline, a decent title, subheadings, graphic elements, search engine optimization, and a modest word count. 1. Get Out the Map A roadmap is an important foundational step because it gives the blog a path forward that both editor and author can follow. A roadmap clarifies questions such as “What is the purpose of this blog or blog series?” and “Who am I writing for?” It also specifically defines and develops the content to be covered. Editor and author can draft an outline together. A side benefit is that a robust outline (mostly) prevents misunderstandings about how the blog series will proceed and keeps posts more focused. 2. Reel Them In Crafting cool titles and subheadings is important. A title is the first element a reader sees, and it should be framed in such a way that it captures the reader’s attention. It’s the hook, and it matters. If the title is uninspiring or unclear, the reader may pass on by. The subheadings also need to be carefully thought out as they helpfully break up the text into manageable chunks and draw readers’ eyes downward through the article. 3. Picture This Pictures and other graphic elements are eye candy for a blog and readers love them! Consistently including just the right photo or image can help endear your client’s blog to its readers and even create loyalty to his or her particular angle on the subject, especially if the photos are the blogger's own. 4. The Missing Link Your client’s blog is only one of many millions, yes, millions. One recent estimate puts the total number of blogs at 152 million. That’s quite some competition for blog traffic! There’s a welter of advice for how to develop search engine optimization (SEO)--an ugly phrase for old‐fashioned paper‐lovers like me--which is code for how search engines find, evaluate, and rank a website. The techniques I’ve described so far are strategies for boosting appeal to a desired demographic. Yet, often, the biggest driver for traffic to a blog is how popular Google thinks it is! Google’s perception of popularity is determined by links. Links are the roads of the internet community: build them wisely and you will see increased traffic to your client’s particular spot on the web. Links may be used in these ways:
5. Short 'n Sweet and Often My final tip for successful blogging is to encourage your client to write regularly and economically. The recommended length for blog posts is 200–800 words. A blog post should address the topic its title suggests and do so quickly, giving readers what they are looking for (information, instruction, inspiration, or entertainment) in a tightly crafted, engaging blog post. These are the strategies I use with my client in developing his blog. May you also find inspiration and have fun as you assist others in blogging well! For some more useful tips on building better blogs, check out this post from master blogger Jeff Goins. This month, the New Blue Pencil underscores Embark editor extraordinaire, Shayna K, who tells us why she's passionate about the copyediting craft. I’m an editor. I’ve worked on a variety of things from book-length manuscripts to content marketing emails to blog posts. But I’m also a writer who thinks faster than I type and constantly uses spell check, which means I make mistakes in pretty much everything I write. So, though I’ve read the Chicago Manual of Style front to back and occasionally peruse grammar forums to get a kick, even I have used “there” instead of “their” and been the subject of scorn from strangers on the internet. It’s not a writer’s job Why do the best of us still make such obvious mistakes in areas that we are supposedly expert? It’s because we’re too close to our material. We need to let go, move on, and let someone else take over; even editors can’t edit their own writing. Everyone who writes, whether writing is their sole profession or if it is just another function of their job, needs to call in someone with fresh eyes and an open mind, and that’s where editors come in. A writer’s first responsibility should be to compose a message; only later should mechanical accuracy be considered. Our job as writers is to perfectly translate an idea into language; often, this is an idea that we conceived ourselves. It is not always our job to then ensure that the phrases, symbols, and clauses fit within a semi-defined structure. That’s sometimes best left to someone else. Everyone makes mistakes Writers make mistakes for various reasons. Maybe the writer is too familiar with the material and can’t give it a fair glance. They’ve played with the message in their head for hours and made dozens of micro-edits as the content evolved. At this point, the writer probably doesn’t want to look at whatever they wrote for a good long time. Another reason writers make mistakes is that they often work on a tight deadline. Journalists, copywriters, marketers, and public relations professionals usually have just a few days to thoroughly research and compose a killer article or content offering. Authors and academic writers, though they may have a longer time to condense months of research and exposition work into a full-length piece, may still operate under a publisher’s timeline. And all writers eventually face difficult or technical subject matter that is challenging to express: How can we shorten this necessary but tedious seven-line sentence without losing any of the meaning? Mistakes make a difference And if you had any doubt, yes, it does matter if your work has mistakes. Most of the errors writers make are minor, like my “their” and “there” mishap, but other mistakes could have more dire consequences. Let’s say you work for an environmental nonprofit and are writing an email to all of your newsletter subscribers letting them know about a fundraising campaign you’re running to increase access to food in isolated communities. You finish the newsletter, read through it a few times, and you’re ready to press send. But the website link you included is missing a character! You typed http:/savetheworld.com instead of http://savetheworld.com. Now the hyperlink won’t work and fewer people will participate in your campaign. An editor might have fixed hunger! Can an editor really do all that? Okay, so maybe that editor wouldn’t have fixed hunger. But editors can still do a lot. A good editor can make sure that links work, ideas flow coherently, definitions make sense, the message is clear, and that your words sound good. At most, this can help you build relationships, write exciting prose, attract and retain clients, tell better stories, and gain credibility. And error free, well structured writing will always shine, giving your idea the spotlight it deserves. Editors aren’t just for professional authors—they’re for anyone who writes, including lawyers, entrepreneurs, scientists, and more. So, if you ever write anything that needs to get a message across, think about getting an editor. And now, it’s time for me to send this document over to mine. Shayna Keyles, a founding member of the Embark Editorial Agency, is a content strategist, writer, and editor. She is currently taking on freelance copyediting contracts. For more information, contact her at skeylesATgmail.com. |
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November 2017
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