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Granta 122: Betrayal was published in Spring 2013.
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House Style: Editing Brazil

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We were sitting at the pub down the street from the office. We’d just printed out the Book – a whole manuscript of The Best of Young Brazilian Novelists – and sent it off to the proofreader for final checking. It was Friday afternoon, and we were ready to celebrate. We’d spent weeks glued to our desks until all hours of the night, poring over pages and staring at our screens, fielding queries from fact checkers and comments from translators and changes from authors. We’d met our deadline. The issue looked good.

Still, my head was full of tiny, miscellaneous, lingering concerns: Would ‘upon’ be better if capitalized in a title? Should a washcloth be described as hanging inside out? What’s the best translation ‘Why are we still talking about typos?’ for xoxota: ‘cunt’ or ‘pussy’? Can a city be dust-covered and windy at the same time? Have we been consistent in the way we punctuate maté, Sugarloaf Mountain, the newspaper Folha de S. Paulo, the Candidates Tournament for chess and every one of the numerous international airports mentioned in the stories? Is it possible for a headless chicken to stare at you? Does ‘shithole’ have a hyphen in it?

For the weekend, at least, I could put all these thoughts aside. It was lovely to be able to relax with colleagues.

There was talk of ordering some food. I looked down at the sandwich menu: kiln smoked salmon and horseradish chive creme fraiche in toasted wholemeal bread. ‘Kiln smoked’ probably should be hyphenated, I thought – it’s acting as an adjective modifying smoked salmon – and ‘creme’ needs the accent. Also, does ‘in’ make sense here? Wouldn’t it be better if it was ‘on’? Was this some kind of innovative sandwich that involved salmon being placed inside the bread?

‘Why don’t we share some appetizers to start?’ one of us suggested.

‘Redundant,’ I muttered to myself. Appetizers are starters; either cut ‘to start’ or change ‘appetizers’ to ‘plates’. Then again, in some cases, people order only appetizers, and don’t go on to have a main course. So was it actually essential to say ‘to start’, to clarify that, in this instance, everyone should feel free to order more food after the first sharing course? I wasn’t sure.

I tried to concentrate on the actual conversation. The topic, it seemed, was the new Batman film.

‘It has a spelling mistake in it,’ someone said. ‘There was a shot of a newspaper headline. Spelled “hiest” instead of “heist”.’

‘Christ. Multimillion-dollar movie.’

‘Seriously. It was pretty hard to concentrate on the scene after that.’

And so we fell into another version of an old discussion, one that I’m sure is repeated all the time in editorial offices and other nerd habitations around the world. We began to recite the usual litany of complaints against the un-copy-edited, ungrammatical text that pollutes our reading environments and disrupts our lives. The unnecessary quotation marks; the over-corrections and redundancies (between you and I, the reason is because); the nouns-used-as-verbs (to reference, to partner); the epidemic abuse of the word ‘literally’ to signify its opposite; the ubiquitous misplaced apostrophes. I felt enormous fellow feeling, self-satisfaction and relief as I explained how oppressed I am every day by a plaque hanging on a railing in my neighbourhood that I can’t help but stare at on my way to work: BICYCLE’S WILL BE REMOVED.

All heads around the table nodded in sympathy. Then, just as quickly, they began to shake with despair.

‘We’re freaks,’ one said. ‘Why are we still talking about typos?’

‘Are we ever going to be normal ever again?’

‘Have we been ruined . . . for life?’

Of course, the question is jokey, and more than a little smug, but it also contains a shred of seriousness and uncertainty. It’s not that we doubt that crystal-clear sentences, bulletproof I’m not willing to believe that attending to details or reading very carefully is ever a bad thing. editing and perfect grammar are crucial to an endeavour like Granta. That’s a given. But every time I descend deep into copy-editing mode – this microscopic, obsessive, question-everything, miss-nothing type of reading – I wonder if I am becoming less and less capable of simply enjoying text (or Batman, or sandwiches). I wonder if it makes me unable to see the bigger picture; I wonder if I am ruining beautiful dashes of prose by fussing over commas and consistency.

There is a danger to copy-editing. You start to read in a different way. You start to see the sentence as machinery. You focus on the gears and levers that connect words to one another; you hunt for the wayward semicolon, the unintentionally ambiguous phrase, the clunky repeated word. You even hope they appear, so you can kill them. You see them when they’re not even there, because you relish slashing your pen across the paper. It gets a little twisted.

As with any kind of technical knowledge or specialization, it is possible to take copy-editing too far, to be ruled by it, to not quite be able to shut it off when it ought to be shut off.

Ultimately, though, I don’t actually think it diminishes the pleasures of reading. The idea of a pure reading experience is a myth, anyway, because purity is a myth. I’m not willing to believe that attending to details or reading very carefully is ever a bad thing. A sentence is, in fact, a machine, an intricate and delicately balanced equation; good copy-editing – good editing more generally – is a way to help a writer get the equation so exactly right that it starts to not seem like one at all. Many times a day, I’ll be hunched over a paragraph, wondering whether a particular pronoun has the correct antecedent, whether one independent clause should be dependent, and suddenly I’ll be caught off guard by a stunning turn of phrase or find myself jolted by a perfectly articulated insight. The power that writing can have, at these times, far outstrips the power it would have were I merely a so-called casual reader. I might be a freak, and ruined for life, but I’m resigned to – no, happy with – this fate. ■

Photo by Daniela Silva.

Comments (27)

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  1. ld227

    Tue Nov 27 20:41:48 GMT 2012

    I love this post and decided to create an account. The page for creating an account contains the following: "If you are a subscriber to the magazine, having account will allow you to register for full access to our online archive."
    s/b "...having an account..."

    It never ends.

    #

  2. Yuka

    Sun Nov 18 09:24:08 GMT 2012

    Duplicated comment

  6. growler

    Tue Nov 27 19:16:36 GMT 2012

    Is should be "Have we been consistent in the way we punctuated." Also, you really should be using Webster's Eleventh, not Oxford Concise.

    Signed,
    Uptight Nitpicking Copy Editor

    #

  7. fleurdelivres

    Tue Nov 27 19:32:40 GMT 2012

    Like looking in a mirror.

    #

  8. laneefe

    Tue Nov 27 20:24:32 GMT 2012

    I have a very different relationship to copyediting -- so maybe I'm a freak among freaks -- but the more publications you work for, the more evident it is that right and wrong, good and bad are not the most productive ways of relating to articulation. Moreover, because language is essentially figurative, the drive for clarity is doomed in its inception; i.e., the worm is in the core. You can call that last bit redundant, but some people call it “repetition with a difference,” without which there would be very little shared reality. If you want to call it redundancy, then redundancy is built into language and its use; it is necessary if there is any hope in the dream of communication. In addition, the more you study the history of print and books, the more evident it is that standardization and consistency are not at all a requirement of literacy (be it the reading or writing kind), intelligence, or persuasiveness. These qualities are a function of one’s ability to recognize the possibilities of meaning and negotiate them in a given linguistic situation.

    The existence of copyediting is in part a symptom of an ideological orientation toward Enlightenment rationality and order, and style guides are a kind of institutionalized “narcissism of small differences.” Though I wouldn’t want to begrudge anyone the opportunities for pleasure in this crazy world, I personally derive only moderate pleasure from rationality, order, and discriminating small differences. The greater pleasure I get from copyediting (when I get it) is not in correcting mistakes or being “right” or producing “good” copy. I don't generally see mistakes as such. When I am reading copy, I see the way language gets used both artfully and artlessly in all these creative, accidental, overdetermined, fascinating ways. For me the excitement is in the prism—the refraction—not in the rainbow (so to speak).

    #

  11. Daniela Zappi

    Tue Nov 20 07:47:20 GMT 2012

    Mate does not need an accent in Portuguese or even in Spanish... At least not this Maté accent - it would if we emphasised the last vowel but the emphasis is in the first syllable...

    #

  12. Yuka

    Tue Nov 20 11:31:36 GMT 2012

    Daniela, Thanks for weighing in on maté. We weren't sure about this, but our dictionary has it with an accent, and for consistency's sake we went with that.

    Diego, So interesting about the different states of Brazil, and something that we discussed as we edited and during our week of events with the authors. And thanks for telling us a good curse word!

    Liz, This is an issue having to do with the lovely and underused subjunctive mood -- thanks for bringing it up! I don't think it's necessary to use it in this context, because 'if' hasn't been used to imply future doubt of something occurring. If I were (!) to use it, it would change the nuance of the sentence.

    #

  13. rcashdan

    Sat Jan 05 15:31:52 GMT 2013

    Ass for mate (the drink) you don't say whether you were using an English or Portuguese dictionary but I think you should appreciate the real world correction above explaining the way the word is pronounced rather than citing the dictionary.

    #

  14. Yuka

    Mon Nov 26 18:16:56 GMT 2012

    aslo_white, Thanks for pointing out the split infinitive in my reply to a comment! (It's true, it never ends.)

    I do try to avoid split infinitives when possible, but I am of the school that they're not technically wrong.
    http://oxforddictionaries.com/words/split-infinitives

    FinalEyes, I can imagine that typography is another hazardous trade! An interesting comparison, and thank you for it and for your sweet enthusiasm. (PS: Copy-editing is hyphenated in our house style.)

    #

  15. Miss Read

    Fri Nov 16 16:58:47 GMT 2012

    (Please read this as a JOKE, or at least a half-joke, from another freak copy editor.)

    "It was Friday afternoon and we were ready to celebrate." --arguably these clauses are not short enough to omit the necessary comma between them.

    fielding queries, yes.
    fielding comments? hmm.
    fielding changes? grr.

    dust-covered=no hyphen unless placed before a noun

    (why hyphenate copy-edit but not proofread?)

    wash cloth=washcloth

    "connect words to each other"--s/b connect words to one another

    why put 'pure' in quotes when the word is not being used figuratively?

    #

  16. Yuka

    Sat Nov 17 11:08:41 GMT 2012

    Hahaha! Miss Read, this was exactly what I wanted to happen when we posted this. Thanks for joining us in freakdom.

    'It was Friday afternoon and we were ready to celebrate.' I see your point, and have added a comma.

    fielding comments/changes: fielding can mean 'to take care of or respond to (as a telephone call or a request)' so I think this is OK.

    dust-covered: in our style guide, we hyphenate compound adjectives if removing the comma might cause confusion.

    copy-edit, proofread, wash cloth: these follow our style guide (based on the Oxford Dictionary of Writers and Editors, Oxford Spelling Dictionary, and the 11th edition of the Oxford Concise Dictionary.)

    connect words to each other/one another: I went back and forth on this, but concluded that a word is only connected to the word next to it -- hence each other. Now that you've pointed it out, though, I'm starting to agree with you. I think I'll change.

    'pure' in quotes: you're absolutely right; I have removed.

    #

  17. Catherine Anyango

    Sat Nov 17 11:55:19 GMT 2012

    We need to talk about your ellipses?

    ‘Have we been ruined . . . for life?’

    or

    'Have we been ruined … for life?'

    #

  18. Catherine Anyango

    Sat Nov 17 11:59:09 GMT 2012

    Unrelated - am very intrigued to see Mo Hayder's Hanging Hill in the corner of the frame! What's going on there?

    #

  19. aslo_white

    Sun Nov 25 17:18:46 GMT 2012

    The problem with us freaks is that it NEVER ENDS.

    To wit:

    "I went back and forth on this, but concluded that a word is only connected to the word next to it -- hence each other."

    s/b "...a word is connected only to..."

    #

  20. FinalEyes

    Sun Nov 25 22:48:30 GMT 2012

    Dear Yuka Igarashi. That's not a salutation as much as a term of endearment for your piece on copy editing. (Shouldn't that be one word?)

    I was born a typographer and became a copyeditor (and proofreader) after the typesetting industry collapsed with the advent of the Mac. My design clients had taught me how to be a good typographer, and I became so persnickety about it that I couldn't read a book unless the type was at least cared for if not crafted. I remember reading an old copy of Conrad's "Heart of Darkness," in which the type was so poorly kerned I had to quit the book.

    Both copyediting and typography are hazardous trades — ones we would never willingly relinquish. And you gave such perfect voice to the passion.

    Thank you.

    #

  21. VIV´S

    Fri Jan 18 17:19:34 GMT 2013

    Hello! I would like to ask when will be released the spanish version of Granta 121. Thank you a lot!

    #

  22. George Balanchine

    Sat Dec 01 12:32:49 GMT 2012

    Sorry to be a nit-picking reader, but the banality of:

    "Ultimately, though, I don’t actually think it diminishes the pleasures of reading. The idea of a pure reading experience is a myth, anyway, because purity is a myth..."

    diminishes what could have been an interesting article. The writer goes on to use words like 'over-determined', and 'Enlightenment', which leads me to believe that he or she has read far too much Foucault, Derrida, and all the other phonies of post-Modernism.

    #

  23. lauracatherinebrown

    Wed Nov 28 16:49:10 GMT 2012

    I love this post! What's up with people who don't know an m-dash from a hyphen? Grammar boors!

    #

  24. Diego Lops

    Mon Nov 19 15:15:29 GMT 2012

    "What’s the best translation for xoxota: ‘cunt’ or ‘pussy’?"

    Xoxota is not a very common word. I've never used it, or maybe once or twice when I was a kid. The most common word for it (20/1) is "buceta". And we never use xoxota to curse. But I guess the real problem faced when translating Brazilian authors is that many words are quite common in one state but sound weird in another (and we have 27 states). So what to do when you translate them?

    #

  25. Yuka

    Mon Nov 19 11:15:09 GMT 2012

    Catherine, Happy to discuss ellipses any time! (Our house style dictates spaced ellipses always.)

    Mo Hayder: that's an ad we printed in the Book, for Bath Spa University.

    #

  26. Yuka

    Mon Nov 19 11:15:31 GMT 2012

    Duplicated comment

  27. Liz Woodbury

    Mon Nov 19 14:23:48 GMT 2012

    "Wouldn’t it be better if it was ‘on’?"

    Correct me if I'm wrong, but shouldn't it be "Wouldn't it be better if it were 'on'?"

    #

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