by @RamonaRichards

There’s a meme floating around, which was started by a gentleman out of the UK named David East. It’s a familiar trope these days; a normal job with a boring title gets an exciting euphemism instead. In this case, “copy editor” gets the description: “I am here to right what has gone wrong.”

The reasoning: it sounds mysterious and ominous. Also, it implies you might have a sword. 

I have a sword  (see photo). I also have these nifty knives (see other photo). I’m not sure these indicate I’m mysterious and ominous as much as just plain old weird. But each of them does have a unique purpose. After all, I’m only going to use one of these to peel an apple.

As an editor and copy editor, I am definitely a “righter of wrongs.” And as a writer, I create a number of those “wrongs” as well. When I’m working as a line editor, the work is less about corrections than observations and verifications. Proofreading, on the other hand, is about finding the wrongs…not correcting them. That’s left up to an editor, because not everything a proofreader finds is actually “wrong.” 

This layering of tasks is one reason I’m quick to say that even editors need editors. I often run into folks who think that every editorial step along the way is essential redoing what was done before, just seeing what was missed. But just as each of those blades have a different purpose, each editorial task has a different goal. 

And no one person can or should do them all. Ever.

Our brains are wired to see on the page what we THINK is supposed to be there—not necessarily what’s actually there. That’s one reason mistakes make their way through four different stages of editing. It’s natural, and it takes training and attention to detail to spot the “wrongs.” In our current process at Iron Stream, a book is read by at least four different people. In my own book that’s coming out from Kregel in November, at least six people went through it—and I was marking corrections on a pdf the week it went to press. And this is on a book that had been read by numerous beta readers well before it got to the publisher. Still, those pesky little things hung on for dear life. 

Here’s an example. This one sentence, embedded in the middle of a paragraph, made it through until the final proofreading: “They gathered at the kitchen tab for a discussion.”

Now…with it set off by itself like that, you probably spotted the problem right away. But in a longer paragraph, almost everyone who had read it saw what was SUPPOSED to be there…instead of what was. Fortunately, we found it before press time. And when I went back to check—yes, it was in the original manuscript.

Remember this: There is no such thing as a perfect book. This is truth. But you really do want to make it as close to such as you possibly can. So if you are self publishing, hire and trust a good editor, copy editor, and proofreader. If you are traditionally published, trust your team and work as closely as possible with them. 

Because we all need a few “righters of wrongs” in our lives. 

Ramona Richards has been a writer and editor for 39 years. She’s the author of 13 books, including Tracking Changes: One Editor’s Advice to Inspirational Fiction Authors (New Hope) and Burying Daisy Doe (Kregel), which will be out in November. She loves encouraging other writers and speaking at conferences, to which she brings her own teabags…and occasionally her sword.