FemaleScienceProfessor posted a few days ago about "intense" editing of scholarly writing, and the different reactions students have to the experience:
Although an individual student's response to being intensely edited can vary with time and mood, there tend to be typical responses from each student. These typical responses are no doubt related to very deep aspects of their psyches and stem from previous experiences with teachers, women (maybe even their mothers..), or anyone who has ever criticized their punctuation. Who knows from whence these reactions spring.. Whatever the source, it's kind of fascinating.
Below is a list of responses I have gotten from different students for approximately the same amount of editing (as measured by density and seriousness of edits/document). Despite holding editing density and intensity approximately constant, the rest of the variables are many and complex and relate to how the student and I have interacted over time, and how stressed the student is about the document, life, deadlines, career etc. The list must therefore be interpreted with caution, if at all.
(Click through to her post to read the list.)
While I would like to say that I have always handled the editing of my writing with dignity and grace, it'd be kind of a, what's the word... lie. The reality is a little closer to Henghis Hapthorn in Majestrum: "We do not speak of the time-resolved collision paper."
At NIST, the paper-writing process was called "paper torture" for a reason, and it wasn't that we were waterboarding our printed drafts. The process consisted of one author writing a draft, circulating it to everybody else, and then having a three-hour meeting in which every word of every sentence was challenged by somebody.
I have to admit, I had a slight tendency to take this personally. Not so much in a "my confidence in my ability to write well has been shattered" sense, though. More of a "how dare you criticize my deathless prose" kind of way. This probably dragged some paper torture sessions out longer than they needed to be, because my co-authors were almost always right, but having my drafts that I worked hard on cut to pieces always got my back up. There's one phrase in the time-resolved collisions paper-- a model is described as "conceptually simple"-- that I fought for harder than it probably needed to be fought for, because by God, I was going to win one argument about the writing.
In the intervening years, I haven't exactly mellowed. I have, however, gotten to know a number of editors and authors, and started to read the blogs and LiveJournals of many more, so I've become more aware of the, um, let's say "quirks" of many professional writers. There are some deeply crazy people out there writing books and stories.
As a result, I've vowed to do my best not to become a character in a Neurotic Author Story down the line. I have a mental list of things I'm not going to do, or at least, things I'm not going to let my editor see me do as I work on the book-in-progress.
That doesn't mean I haven't had the occasional Neurotic Author Moment during the editing process. Quite the contrary. It just means that Kate's the one who's had to bear the brunt of my Neurotic Authoring. Looking back, every round of comments thus far has led to approximately the same series of events: railing at the stupidity of the comments, declaring everything totally unreasonable, having a crushing crisis of confidence in my ability to produce a reasonable book out of all this, then finally sitting down and making some approximation of the requested changes, and realizing that the manuscript is substantially better as a result.
And despite all that, Kate hasn't divorced me yet. She's way too good to me.
We're nearing the end of the process at last. I've been promised one final set of line edits by Friday, and then things shift in the direction of the production process. The final book should be out this fall, and there has already been some discussion of which of our many dog pictures should go on the cover (feel free to offer suggestions in the comments...).
I figure that means there will be two more rounds of Neurotic Author behavior-- one starting Friday, and one Ultimate Nuclear Meltdown Version when the copyeditors get hold of it ("Stet! STET! For the Love of God, STET!"). I'll do my best to keep it away from my editor (and off the blog), though.
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one Ultimate Nuclear Meltdown Version when the copyeditors get hold of it ("Stet! STET! For the Love of God, STET!")
May I rant here about a copy editing tic about a certain journal publisher, which publishes the leading journals in my subfield?
As you know, in the era of online publication APS and AIP journals have replaced page numbers with paper numbers in the format NNSSPP, indicating the Pth paper to be published on subject S (a numerical code which depends on the specific journal) in issue number N of the current volume. For example, the second plasma physics paper in this week's PRL would be 045002.
The journal publisher in question has a policy of inserting commas into numbers of five or more digits. The practice dates from the paper publication era, when Journal of Subfield Physics might run 30k or more pages in a single volume. It was slightly confusing even then, as the publisher's style sheet uses commas to separate other elements in reference entries like journal title, volume, page number, and (in those days) year of publication.
If you guessed that the publisher applies this rule to APS paper numbers, you are correct. Thus the paper number gets rendered NNS,SPP (in my example: 045,002). Which is even more confusing than without the comma, because they have intentionally split a subject code. It doesn't take an online information technologist to figure out that this is WRONG!!, but they do it anyway, and it always bugs me when I see such a paper reference in their journals.
I tend to be fairly mellow about publications editting (in this case, I'm thinking white papers, of which I write quite a few these days, and other similar papers that are intended for wide circulation inside this company and our business partners) but there are some things that still drive me absolutely insane during our editting process.
My absolute worst, though, is when someone not only corrects something that isn't wrong, but they actively break it in the process. I've found this most often occurs with short, common, Latin abbreviations: i.e., e.g., N.B., etc. Not so much with etc, though, since everyone knows that one.
The biggest fight I had was over N.B., which I ended up not only having to unpack, then explain to my helpful editor, then finally translate back into English.
I weep.
OK - so what does STET stand for? I'm missing the best joke, I'm sure, because I can't remember the terminology - help a sister out, here!
"Stet" isn't an acronym, it's a proofreading mark. It means "Leave this as originally written" when looking at suggested changes by a copy editor.
I think it's Latin, or Latin-derived.
It's funny to hear Chad describe his reaction to editorial "suggestions," as they are perilously similar to my own (with the principal difference being that I am not now, nor am I likely to ever be, writing a book). I get pissed, get neurotic, make the changes, and finally agree that the changes were for the better.
Of course, getting pissed at all is quite hypocritical of me, since I am a pretty... um... thorough editor of other people's writing.