Editors Miss Things

I’ve had people find typos or errors in my books and proclaim, “If I had edited it, I would have found all of them.”

Probably not. Even word processors now help us find problems and we still can miss things. Or we make changes in a document that mess up something else. I don’t know how that happens, but it does. Little gremlins in the word processor? Mischievous pixies in my keyboard? Whatever causes these shenanigans, errors in a manuscript can happen regardless of how hard we try to avoid them.

Early on in my editing career I worked with four authors on an anthology. A collection of four novellas. At some point I couldn’t see things clearly anymore and I sent each author a copy of the three stories they didn’t write—to proofread for mistakes. Amazingly enough they each found totally different things that I and others had missed. FOUR eyes on the same manuscript, and we all found different issues with each story. Now that’s not just typos or misspellings. It might have been a homonym or homophones! I’ve even written ear when I meant hear. How complicated this could be? Very.

Add house rules and whether the publisher is using the Chicago Manual of Style or the APA. Here’s a funny look at that battle by the Onion (a satire site).

Editing is surely about spelling but it is also about pacing and overused words and so many other layers of issues that are taken into consideration that I would have your head spinning if I tried to get them all and I’m sure I would miss some things. Probably would miss moving body parts. Adverbs. Telling instead of showing. It goes from big picture down to every paragraph, sentence and word usage and placement.

I guess all that is to say, if you find a typo or two, or a missing period or a quote without an end quote… give the author, editor and publishing house some grace. Some houses are small and we don’t have as many eyes on a manuscript as a bigger publisher. We would all love to have no one find anything wrong at all. As an author who has the last eyes on a document it can fall to me to find any little escapee issues but even then it can be a challenge. By the time it gets to that point I often can’t see the story clearly. My brain knows the story so my eyes can easily skip over things that might be wrong.

Please give us grace, grace and more grace. Editors miss things. I’ll blame it on the gremlins or pixies. The more I publish the less excited or bothered I get about one of those runaway editorial snafus that slip past us all. I have bigger concerns right now anyway. Like how to get my puppy not to poop in the house. Those little nuggets are definitely more bothersome to me than a misspelled word.

Hmmm, am I smelling something? Guess I better go check. Oliver? Where are you?