Reflection 8

Recently at the Press I've been continuing to work on editing the coal mining book. It's going well; I've really gotten into a system with working on it and I've gotten comfortable with it. My stylesheet is getting more and more organized and every day I write down where I left off and any odd detail I might need to remember in case I'm in the middle of something when it's time to leave. I learned the importance of this when I came in one day and re-edited at least five pages of a book, knowing that I had read it before but not knowing where I left off. Being more organized saves time and helps me do better work on the project. Also, my boss, Than, has noticed that I'm keeping it and seemed impressed with how I've moved from disorganized note taking to a style sheet. He mentioned that he might want me to put together a template/instruction set for stylesheets to give to future interns.

I also got more experience sending queries to an author. In this case our main contact is the editor of the book because it is a collection of essays. As I edit if there's anything I can't comfortably fix knowing I'm 100% right, I query the author. I try to keep queries down to a minimum because Than and Rachel, the GA, have told me that authors get discouraged seeing long lists of questions. I generally ask for a confirmation on what page numbers they mean when they say something like 917-825 or if a quote had a misspelling in it and I need to know if it was an accident or needs a [sic]. If I look up a book from a reliable source like Library of Congress and see that they misspelled an editor's name, I just change it without asking because I can be confident that I'm OK to do that.

Than asked me to get together my list of queries for the first five or six chapters and send them to him, then he would look them over and send any corrections back to me to fix before he sent them to the editor. I sent them and he noticed a few small grammatical things and a place where I had been unclear. I point out the place of a query in an endnote by saying "1. Author's name, endnote 25: Did you mean to reference...?" When it's in text I say "1. Author, page 128, yellow highlight: Is it Connor or Conner?" I hadn't made it clear anywhere that I would be highlighting the places in question, so it seemed like there was already a highlight in the text I was asking about. That was helpful for me to realize that I need to step back and remember that the author isn't familiar with how I edit and I might need to explain my techniques for each author. One thing that was a tiny bit annoying was I got a "Never say that!" comment on one of my queries because I basically took down word for word when Than told me to tell the author that "the Press wasn't qualified" to distinguish between all the different citation formats the authors use for census documents. However, if that's the harshest criticism I get, I'm lucky. Besides, I did think that sounded bad when I wrote it the first time but I decided to just go with it. I now know to ask when I think an instruction sounds odd, or to at least use better judgement when writing to authors and editors. I also know that what Than, Rachel and I say to each other does not exactly translate into a professional email to an author/editor.