Wendalyn Nichols writes for and is the editor of Copyediting magazine. She also teaches editing.
Q: What is your preferred environment for editing?
A: I do pretty much everything on-screen. When I used to work on hard copies, we would print dictionary pages on oversized sheets so we could have big enough margins to make corrections in, and use different inks so we would know which editor had done what. And we used a lot of White-Out. It was a total pain. When I was editing book manuscripts, I always found that there would be one or two instances of a global change that I missed despite my best efforts; now I can do all of that in one "replace all" pass.
Q: What punctuation mark are you fondest of?
A: I think the semicolon is underappreciated. People are terribly put off by its use (or they just don't know how to use it properly) and tend to use a dash instead, which they say feels less formal. And I think they're right, but the trouble is that then if you use, say, three dashes in one sentence, you don't know what is meant to be set apart. And the dash isn't neutral as a replacement for the semicolon: it's informal, and so people need to be aware that it's not appropriate for many contexts.
Q: What punctuation, spelling, grammar, style, or usage error annoys you the most?
A: Danglers are the top of my list. I saw one on a language-related site today: the lead-in paragraph that was meant to entice me to read on said, "As a young kid growing up in the Ozarks, most other boys my age were hunting, fishing, or playing baseball." Well, most other boys were not the young kid growing up in the Ozarks. You want the subject there, the "I." Instead, it's buried in "my age." I see this kind of thing all over the place, from pulpy chick lit to the New York Review of Books.
Q: If you weren't in your current line of work, what would you be doing instead?
A: Oh, man . . . I'd be an academic, I suppose. I very nearly became one—I had another year left of scholarship money at Oxford and might have been able to convert my M.Phil into a D.Phil in that time if I had really stuck it out, but I was burned out. And the 180 pages of my master's thesis was the right size for its topic. It wouldn't have stretched well, so I would have had to start over. I was teaching EFL before I became an editor, so I guess I might still be doing that. Or waiting tables in Seattle.
Q: What drove you to become an editor?
A: In some ways I was always an editor. I was the kid who liked doing those exercises in the language workbooks where you had to put all the punctuation in an unpunctuated block of text. My job in college was editing 80 papers a week written by the remedial writing students in the language lab. And I adored the logical aspect of linguistics studies. When I taught English, it was remedial or it was to non-native speakers, so I was always fixing things.
At a certain point when I was living in London and teaching English to European business executives, I kind of snapped; I did not want to teach the present perfect to one more German software engineer. I saw an ad in The Guardian that was, essentially, "lexicographers, will train." I became a trainee lexicographer with Longman, worked my way up, was headhunted by Random House, got laid off when the company closed the reference division, freelanced, then landed with Copyediting. There aren't that many people in this country who are trained to write dictionaries, especially ones who can analyze corpus data. There aren't that many people who can write authoritatively about usage. But there are millions of people who care about the language. So it's great to feel I'm helping other editors to help writers.
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