[I miss the "Authors on Parade" board that a fellow production editor set up at my last in-house academic publishing job so we could all share authorial antics that made us wonder what pathology kept us in the editorial trenches (or sausage factory, another favorite metaphor). Maybe this blog can work as a freelancer's substitute.]
I’m bogged down in this ms. that should have been fairly straightforward, a relatively hands-off edit for an author who has published several books and is particular in the extreme, though you wouldn't know it from the sloppiness of her documentation. Two other copyeditors have already bailed out on this ms., and I completely understand why. One instruction she sent an earlier copyeditor, through the production editor, was this: “The CE should replace the commas at beginning and end of restrictive clauses with dashes. She should not remove these commas unless she also replaces them with dashes.”
Silly me. Restrictive clauses aren’t supposed to be set off at all, right?—so I assumed she was just confusing “restrictive” with “nonrestrictive,” the way a lot of us (even editors) can if we’re dashing off a quick memo.
But no, turns out that in addition to using-hyphens like-they're-going-out-of-style, she also likes to set practically every clause off in one way or another—commas, dashes, parentheses . . . Her writing’s all chopped up with unnecessary commas that do nothing but make her writing both herky-jerky and confusing, like this (I’ve modified the examples a bit to shorten and genericize them, but they’re identical in form to her original sentences):
Great inequities, to the most vulnerable among us, harm everyone.
Another group, threatened with injustice, is children who will be exposed to the consequences of budget cuts.
That’s bad enough, but it gets worse when the subject matter makes the restrictive vs. nonrestrictive distinction more important. Like here:
Ionizing radiation—that you can’t see, hear, taste, touch, or smell—can hurt you.
Here her dashes plus her use of “that” rather than “which” present us with a confusing muddle of restrictive vs. nonrestrictive. Does she mean this?
Ionizing radiation that you can’t see, hear, taste, touch, or smell can hurt you. (Her use of “that” would suggest this interpretation. “That” clauses are typically restrictive clauses: they restrict the subject, or narrow it down to a subset.)
or this?
Ionizing radiation—which you can’t see, hear, taste, touch, or smell—can hurt you.
Surely she means this; surely there’s no ionizing radiation that you can see, hear, taste, touch, or smell, or that can’t hurt you, and that’s precisely why this is called a nonrestrictive clause: the meaning of “ionizing radiation” doesn’t need to be restricted to a subset of “the harmful type.” And her use of dashes would suggest this interpretation. But why didn’t she use “which”? I hadn’t quite realized this till now, but it’s much easier to understand the restrictive use of “which”—it’s much more common, especially across the pond—than to understand her quirky nonrestrictive use of “that.”
The irritating thing about it is, she doesn’t realize this tic of hers is quirky. She doesn't know what she doesn't know; she needs a much heavier copyedit than she realizes. And her arrogant and self-righteous ranting about other copyeditors’ assaults on her precious prose makes me all the more scornful of her syntactical faults, and more disgusted, in an anticipatory sort of way, about how she’s liable to stupidly undo some of my good work.
Yeah, I split that infinitive just because she's the sort who would never commit such a "crime."
