Wednesday, January 20, 2016

Ooh, an editor!

When people ask what I do and I tell them I'm an editor, they often look impressed, even jealous, saying that editing must be a glamorous, exciting job. I often respond by asking if they've ever proofread an index, or trawled through an entire manuscript cross-reference superscript note indicators with the corresponding endnote numbers. They tend to have left by the time I get to the end of the sentence.2 . . .
2Though just for the record, nothing comes close to the near-hallucinogenic thrill of spotting a typo in an index.
Drummond Moir, comp., Just My Typo (New York: Three Rivers Press, 2014), p. 135.

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