Cheryl Klein doesn’t know it, but she was one of my inspirations when I decided to go into editing full-time. I was working at in the book club division at Scholastic, just a couple floors away. I don’t think we ever even met, though we exchanged email once over a typo.
But the idea that there were people in the same office I was in, working magic on magical books, made me hunger to do a lot more than sales projection and analysis. I didn’t want to proofread spreadsheets or corporate database entries for the rest of my life. I was still part of the magic, and I knew that what I did was, on a large scale, vital. But once it really registered that there were people who got to sink up to their elbows in the books themselves, I wanted nothing else than to be one of them.
Cheryl’s blog holds a lot of insight about editing. She’s the sort of editor I aspire to be, less interested in applying rules of grammar with a broad brush and more interested in focusing on each individual story and how best to bring forth what’s at its heart.
SQUIDS 101: Punctuation: Commas is a perfect example of this. Commas are tricky because they’re often subjective. A sentence can be equally correct, technically, with or without. But commas set mood. They can show the personality of the narrator, they can set the pace and drama and tone…or they can throw those things off completely. This post really illustrates how much thought an editor puts into the commas and how they best serve the tone of the manuscript.
Read Cheryl’s post, and think about it when you’re writing. There’s a lot of power in the subtle little comma!
- The Space Debate (83.8%)
- Style Guides (19.1%)
- Belief [comma] Usage [comma] and Preference (19.1%)
- Happy how-do-you-spell-that-again? day! (16.2%)
- Spelling out numbers (16.2%)
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