Dillon talked about the problems inherent in copyediting Mercer lyrics, such as whether or not to include hypens in do-re-mi; about Andrew Porter's compendious music and opera writings for The New Yorker; and about the difficulty of describing voices in words — "I once compared a singer's voice to a ripe Kalamata olive".
The other guarantor of literary quality, copyediting, is becoming a lost art.
He loathed by-the-book copyediting, and on his manuscripts he sometimes added the note "**N.B.: ALL NONSTANDARD SYNTAX IS INTENTIONAL.**" While going over proofs of his last published story, "Good People," which appeared in this magazine in 2007, he wrote, "I have ended up taking more of your changes... than I thought at first I would.
And yet these aspects of the weaker essays reinforce the point that all of the stronger pieces makes: every issue of every litmag requires people to do "the copyediting, the layout, the negotiation," as Carolyn Kuebler, of Rain Taxi and New England Review, puts it, "the planning and organizing and get-it-done work".
I am curious, as a print-magazine copy chief, whether you think copyediting has a future in the iPad/iPhone publishing-app world?
Wendalyn Nichols, editor of the newsletter Copyediting, proposed rupture as an alternative label, evoking "a wound that can't clot, that is not self-healing".
The translation, by Adrian West, has won an English PEN award but is nevertheless erratic and would have benefited from diligent copyediting.
We can put this straight into copyediting.' And I know if I had read that book as a reader I wouldn't have disrespected the writer, but it wasn't doing what I wanted it to do.
(Small print: We reserve the right to copyedit submissions, and names will used unless requested otherwise).
But it's also noteworthy that not once in the entire discussion does either of them mention who's going to a) structurally edit or b) copyedit their books if they're published online, except fleetingly as an outsourced resource they can pay for.
I've copyedited or written news stories for a handful of major US newspapers over the past 18 months – the Houston Chronicle in Texas, San Francisco Chronicle in California and Newsday in Long Island, New York and others – yet it's doubtful that any of the editors or senior executives for those news organizations could pick me out of a police line-up.
