Newsletter of the East Bay Chapter of STC
March/April 2003

Copyediting—Who Needs It?

by Elaine Parrish
DMV Copyeditor

You’re a professional writer. You’ve done your homework by carefully researching your topic. You’ve written, read, tested, re-read, rewritten, and polished your piece, until you know it’s perfect. You’ve labored and sweated and prayed in a rush to submit it at the last minute, just under a deadline that, as usual, is completely unrealistic. Who has time for copyediting? After all, you’ve already run it through the spell checker.

Then you see your piece come out in print with your name listed proudly at the top—and your eyes jump unbidden to a glaring typo in the middle of the second paragraph. D’oh! How could you have missed it? This is when you begin to realize the truth of Barker’s Law: Proofreading is more effective after publication.

If this scenario sounds familiar to you, you’re not alone. In this uncertain economy, companies are being forced to cut corners wherever they can. Regrettably, quality control is often one of the first fatalities. Amazing advances in technology may cause corporate decision makers to lose sight of the fact that technology is only as good as the humans who program it—and we humans are…well, only human! (Readers of “a certain age” will remember how excited we all were when spell checking first became available on our word processing programs. We were sure that our documents would thenceforward be free of errors. How disappointing that assumption turned out to be!)

Team Effort

I’ve been a copyeditor for over twenty years, and in that time I’ve witnessed incredible changes in technology, and in the documents generated by, for, and about it. One basic fact has remained unchanged: good writing, a human endeavor, can always be made even better. This requires a team effort, and your copyeditor should be considered an integral part of your team.

As a fellow editor, Dan A. Wilson of The Editor’s DeskTop (an online editing service), points out, “Even a superb writer needs a good editor. A merely good writer needs a superb editor.” As a writer, you have a job to do: to communicate to your readers. And as a copyeditor, I have a job to do: to ensure that possible barriers to that communication are removed.

Importance of Copyediting

Why should copyediting be considered so important if, after all, you’re the writer—and thus the expert? The fact that you are indeed the writer, and the expert, can actually work to your disadvantage. As the writer, your very closeness to the work that you’ve been focusing on so intently can make you oblivious to devious little errors or inconsistencies that have subtly found their way in. You know what you’re trying to say, and when you’ve read over your own words a few dozen times, it’s easy to subconsciously substitute what you meant to write for what you actually wrote. And as the expert, you may be assuming knowledge that your readers do not in fact possess. Your copyeditor acts as a reality check for you by sitting in the place of your audience.

Every writer wants to be respected as a professional. Just as actors should not go onstage without proper rehearsal, writers should not allow their work to be distributed without proper copyediting. And so, for the professional writer, the question is not, “Who needs a copyeditor?” but rather, “Why would I ever want to write without one?”

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