So I've spent the last week or so doing tedium, or "final manuscript preparation," as the styleguide sheet I'm following says. It basically involves going through individual Word documents with a fine-toothed comb, searching for elipses and em dashes and re-adding them with the proper functions, spelling out numbers less than 100, eliminating extra characters, setting titles, sub-titles, sub-sub titles, and getting rid of all the preformatted footnotes and replacing them with superscript by hand...the list goes on and on and on. I'm also making sure that the bibliographies are consistent throughout, and have learned some things about my anal retentiveness during the painstaking process: I like knowing an author's first name. I like the year of publication at the end of the citation. I like the first letters of words in titles, for articles and books and reports, in caps. I like articles to be in quotation marks. I like justified text. And I've re-discovered that I truly do prefer Canadian spelling. Editing is an interesting little animal, and the process of watching - and helping - a text transform from one with potential to one that hammers a point home, weaves a well-crafted story, breaks your heart with words or makes you think hard (whatever the case may be) is really, really rewarding work. I've even found a little zen space in tedium: as robotic as the very systematic process is, there's something almost meditative about paying attention to the small details.
24 July 2005
tidbits on tedium
So I've spent the last week or so doing tedium, or "final manuscript preparation," as the styleguide sheet I'm following says. It basically involves going through individual Word documents with a fine-toothed comb, searching for elipses and em dashes and re-adding them with the proper functions, spelling out numbers less than 100, eliminating extra characters, setting titles, sub-titles, sub-sub titles, and getting rid of all the preformatted footnotes and replacing them with superscript by hand...the list goes on and on and on. I'm also making sure that the bibliographies are consistent throughout, and have learned some things about my anal retentiveness during the painstaking process: I like knowing an author's first name. I like the year of publication at the end of the citation. I like the first letters of words in titles, for articles and books and reports, in caps. I like articles to be in quotation marks. I like justified text. And I've re-discovered that I truly do prefer Canadian spelling. Editing is an interesting little animal, and the process of watching - and helping - a text transform from one with potential to one that hammers a point home, weaves a well-crafted story, breaks your heart with words or makes you think hard (whatever the case may be) is really, really rewarding work. I've even found a little zen space in tedium: as robotic as the very systematic process is, there's something almost meditative about paying attention to the small details.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
3 comments:
Re: Canadian spelling - am I to understand that the standard that you need to right to is not Canadian? And what is the difference between Canadian and UK?
Well, doesn't this just fill my heart with joy. You've made that intense proofreading sound heavenly. I can't wait to read it.
Actually, for the first time in a long time, this is a text that favours the Canadian spelling - I think that's why I'm noticing it so vividly right now! Cdn is actually much closer to the UK, even though wikipedia suggests that it falls somewhere between the American and the British. We seem to use fewer "a's" in our words, though...
Post a Comment