Extr-y, Extr-y

Copy editing might be the single most boring thing in the world. Once upon a time, I took a copy editing test and I was bored by the end of the first paragraph. I also taught English as a foreign language for a chain of private schools in Japan. Before I even got there I knew it wouldn't work out between us. The people they hired were those who had fewer than 2 typos in their lengthy essays about why they wanted the job. Here I thought they were interested in my personality, but all they really wanted was my word processor. Could they be any more shallow?

But there's something I need to tell you about it for when you submit your manuscript to an agent, editor, or submissions manager. And this is true whether we're talking books or magazines, or anything at all, really. Most of us don't especially care for copy editing. We find it monotonous. Even so, a book which is *not* given a once over for correct spellings etc. looks bad. A good book gets demoted. A decent book will be summarily rejected if you're not following the basic rules. So here's a few things to keep in mind.

Elementary school grammar stuff. Mixing up "its" and "it's" or "to" and "too" or "there" and "their." Missing it on ocassion we understand. Miss them a lot and even if your book is otherwise interesting, at the very least we now need to factor in the extra time that needs to be spent copy editing your book. And the more time spent refining a project on that kind of level means less profit, which makes agents and editors alike less likely to pick you up.

Another big one is comma splices and run on sentences. New writers love to have these long, rambling sentences that take up an entire paragraph. As often as not, they get their message confused along the way. There's no shame in using two or three sentences. Hell, except for a certain kind of comedy I think shorter sentences are probably a better bet. They tend to be clearer, more definitive, harder to misunderstand, and of cours they're also easier to fix gramatically.

Next up, punctuation marks. I'm assuming that you, my gentle readers are all writers. Look at something you've written recently. Do you have more than one exclamation point on the average page? How about ellipses? Hyphens and dashes? Parantheticals? New writers tend to overuse all of these things. None of them are inherently bad, but they are distracting and when they're overused, it looks amateurish. When you write, try as an exercise to limit them. Trust me, it helps. As for parantheticals, I'll tell you all what I tell my writing group. Use it or lose it. That's pretty much my battle cry. And yes, editing is war. When I say use it, I mean make it a consistent part of the style. Don't pop one up every sixty pages out of nowhere. Start using them early and use them consistently. For an excellent example, read "The Princess Bride" by William Goldman.

Finally, dialogue tags. We're all guilty of these sometimes. Some common problems include overusing non-standard tags. "Ask" and "said" will be fine nine times out of ten. The next biggest problem is explaining the tags. "Snapped angrily" is redundant and "responded sarcastically" is telling rather than showing. Don't forget to follow basic grammar rules in sentencs with dialogue. "'Holy shit,' Ryan said. 'We're screwed six ways from Sunday.'" NOT "'HOLY SHIT!!!!1' Ryan exclaimed excitedly. 'We're... screwed six ways from Sunday (At least I think we are - right?)!'" I can't even begin to tell you how mad that stuff gets me. Oh, and if you don't know the rules, in American English, quotes start with double marks and any quote inside the quote uses single marks. In British English, this is reversed. If you ever have someone quoting someone else, be sure to play by the rules or you're going to confuse your reader. And when your reader reads 30 queries a day 365, we're in no mood to hold your hand and teach you how to write English. We'll cut the foreign writers some slack, but note that it's only a little. If you live in California, you've got no excuse.