What's In a Job?

A Year In the Life Of a Copy Editor

A copy editor’s job is, on the surface, simple: she prepares a given work for publication.  But this is a deceptively straightforward definition, because what this preparation involves is a lot of decision-making, some of which can be agonizing.

For instance, the narrator in a first-person short story uses the grammatically incorrect phrase “I’d forgot” three times.  Is that the narrator’s colloquialism or the author’s error?  If it is clearly part of the narrator’s “accent” and therefore deliberate, it’s probably best to leave it in (unless, say, the narrator is a professor of English, in which case such an error might be inconsistent with his character).  If the matter is less clear, there are three choices: change it, leave it unchanged, or refer it to the editor-in-chief (who will likely then contact the author).  It is often unclear which is the best choice, but the copy editor must make a decision.

I served as the copy editor of The Fieldstone Review for two consecutive issues and enjoyed the experience.  It requires painstaking attention to detail and, in my experience, the better the story or poem is, the more difficult it is to find the grammatical, syntactical, and punctuation errors and inconsistencies.  When a person gets caught up in the story, her attention to the written details lessens.  Most journals have what they consider a “house style” (e.g. Canadian spelling, British punctuation, Oxford comma), although it’s unlikely that every rule will be written down, so it is a good idea for a new copy editor to go through the previous issue or two to get an idea about the journal’s tendencies.  The copy editor is responsible for ensuring that the upcoming issue matches the house style, amending obvious errors, checking facts for accuracy, and formatting the text for publication.  That’s a lot of work, and it needs to be done within a relatively small window of time.

One of the great things about a copy editor’s job, in my opinion, is that the work isn’t spread out throughout the year.  At The Fieldstone Review, which publishes only once a year, all the work comes in the spring.  Now, I grant that this isn’t great if a person has a full course load and is cramming for exams and writing final papers when the digital tome overloads her laptop, but it's ideal for a student in the second year of an MA programme or a second or upper year of a Ph.D. programme.  Most of the year, I didn’t have to worry about what was happening with the journal; it was only once the reading period was over that my work began.  So, depending on the amount of text to be edited and the time frame a person is working with, a copy editing job for a university journal could last anywhere from a weekend marathon (not recommended!) to a month of evening editing.  And that’s it, until next year.