geckoedit.com
A hopeless semantic. Copyeditor, line editor, proofreader, alt-text writer, tentacle counter. (she/her). www.geckoedit.com
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🦎🏳️🌈🧠🌶️🖖🏻💙📚👀✍️🔥 #amediting
Scritcher in Chief to Peaches and Alabaster. 🐈🐈
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She's a neurotic, anxious, mildly deranged, prissy, zoomy princess who is above burying her own poop and prefers burrowing to climbing. She's definitely smarter than our orange himbo, Alabaster.
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She's a rare orange girl!
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1500 HIV+ babies born per day because he cut off their mothers' meds. Yeah. I think he will be responsible for more deaths than COVID, in the long run.
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Those are things that require you to read the text to fix, as they depend on context and style, so I wouldn't do them as global fixes before my main pass.
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So, in Word, in Find and replace, you can put ^l in find and ^p in Replace to fix them. (Sometimes the ^l is necessary, for example in copyright pages, but rarely in the middle of some dialogue, where they tend to hang out.)
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Changing bad line breaks, like when someone accidentally hits shift+enter instead of just enter. This isn't the same as a new paragraph and can cause havoc with built-in indents and so on.
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Also, I usually don't track these. No need to overwhelm the author with fiddly things that aren't style choices/semantically significant.
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Kill it with fire!
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Every time I get a manuscript to format where a few of these things clearly haven't been done, it's the tip of an iceberg covered in red flags.
Doing this to a short (<50k words) manuscript just caught 330 individual errors.
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Really? Mine go apeshit for ice cubes. They're toys AND they're water!
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Some people think praise comments help soften the attack of edits. But if your edits feel like an attack then you're doing it wrong. Polite, neutral, useful, concise and clear suggestions don't feel like attacks.
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Thank you!
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The most common phrases in my comments are
- how about
- which do you prefer?
- OK to change?
- OK to remove?
- just to double-check
- was this yaddayadda intentional?
- though this should be xxx, OK to stet for voice?
They do a lot of heavy lifting.
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When suggesting alternate wording, consider the rhythm of the sentence and any artistic things the author might have been doing intentionally. A good idea is to try to match not only the meaning but the shape of the word, like its syllables or start and end, or with a similar affix etc.
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Sometimes context can help you not seem like a creepy stalker. Instead of only asking "Is he your only brother?" be sure to mention this query is about commas (unless you're using CMOS 18). Ask me how I know... 😅
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OK, that's it for now! Hope it helps.
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Keep the style sheet focused on author preferences and style exceptions. Don't list things already in the style manual used RAW (rules as written). Ditto the word list: no need to list every word you had to look up. Just the ones that weren't in the dictionary or have multiple acceptable variations.
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It's okay and encouraged to point out where you refrained from correcting out of respect for author's voice (but was that intentional, just to double-check?)
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For tricky issues like conscious language, assume good intentions and approach it from the reader's perspective. Get a copy of @redpenrabbit.bsky.social's Conscious Language Toolkit for useful phrasing and resources.
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If it's a factual error, you don't need to give them the whole context and history and why you know best. "Is this referring to the event on date X or the famous speech about it on Y?" is sufficient.
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Always aim for the solution that changes the author's phrasing the least or has the fewest knock-on effects