Tuesday, July 21, 2009

Copyeditors dish on authors

Authors and copyeditors need each other, but on both sides of the aisle, it is not always a cheerful relationship. If you've ever had one of those experiences when you read through your copyedited manuscript, and wondered...what was he/she thinking? Well, now you get to hear the other side.

A top ten list of authors' most common mistakes, and "what drives copyeditors crazy," is being unveiled at the Oxford University Press blog. The target is writers for medical and scientific journals, but this likely carries over to other fields. While the author of the post is attempting to be helpful, one of copyeditors' top ten complaints, "Making life difficult for the copy editor," seems instead to illuminate the way communication problems can plague both sides of the relationship. The first three are here, and then stay tuned for more views about your "particularly charming" behavior.