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In reply to the discussion: How Much Are You Bothered by Spelling, Grammar, Capitalization, and Punctuation Errors [View all]MineralMan
(148,450 posts)I've always enjoyed my conversations with them, and sometimes even won. My favorite copy editor was the copy chief for one of the magazines for which I was a contributing editor. She and I often had knock-down drag-out battles over usage. She was something of a strict constructionist when it came to the AP style book. I was, and am, a descriptive grammarian, rather than a prescriptive one.
That led to many amusing conversations. Occasionally, I was able to prevail, but the AP style book generally won the day.
On the other hand, I once got a copy editor fired at a major book publisher. She, a recent college graduate, did not understand the content she was editing. The book in question was an instructional book about WordPerfect 6.0 for MSDOS. A good portion of the book contained snippets written in WordPerfect's macro language.
This copy editor had read in her style guide that it was better to use "When" instead of "If" at the beginning of most sentences. So, if I wrote, "If WordPerfect crashes, you can recover part of what you had written by..." It was only humorous when she changed that "If" to "When." Of course, that version of WordPerfect often crashed, so that was appropriate, perhaps.
However, when her global search and replace change programming code statments from If statements to meaningless When statements, that code would not run.
I called the copy editor and explained that she had made a grievous error and that she needed to revert to my original writing. She got angry and told me that I would have to go through the manuscript and manually change her erroneous search and replace changes.
My next call was to the publisher's office, where I made it clear that I was not about to make hundreds of changes, manually, to correct the copy editor's incompetence. He agreed, and dismissed the editor forthwith. Someone else fixed the errors, by reversing the process and selectively making appropriate changes. As it turned out, WordPerfect 6.0 for MSDOS was a major turkey on the market, and my book never earned its advance on royalties. But, never mind.
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