What Makes a Good Editor (and How to Identify the Bad Ones)

A good editor will not tell you what to say or even how to say it. She will not try to silence your voice, but she’ll tell you if it’s inconsistent or strident or otherwise detracting from your message. She won’t change things arbitrarily because she thinks her way is better.

A good editor will ensure that every sentence is syntactically and structurally sound (you’ve said what you intended and done so grammatically) and that every piece of punctuation is serving a purpose. She can explain (in excruciating detail; vide Answers and Explanations in the Grammar Quiz) why she has made a change and can cite chapter and verse from a recognized authority to defend it. If you question the addition of commas to your piece and the editor says “There has to be a comma between independent clauses,” she’s right. If she says “Oh, I thought the reader needed a place to pause,” take your manuscript and run away; that person is a fraud.

A good editor won’t change anything without knowing or checking the applicable rules; she won’t introduce errors. If you have the phrase “as recommended by the Audubon Society” and she capitalizes the, she only thinks she knows what she’s doing. A good editor will follow your argument and detect gaps and inconsistencies. For example, if someone’s name appears as Katy in some places and Katie in others, she will query it or pick one to use every time. She will tell you if your choice of font is not appropriate and perhaps suggest one. (Here’s an extreme example: A scientist painstakingly prepared a table showing long amino acid sequences in the standard one-letter code. He used capital letters to show conserved residues and lowercase letters for mutable ones. He then printed the table out in a sans serif typeface, in which capital eyes and lowercase els are identical, rendering the table useless.)

Many editors are untrained amateurs who fall into editing along the way. Entirely too many simply don’t know what they’re doing and have years of experience in doing it wrong. Most of the editorial websites I have checked out are riddled with errors. If they can’t get it right for themselves, they won’t get it right for you. More than once, people calling themselves editors have changed things in my work that were correct and made them incorrect, giving me the lovely dilemma of whether to tell a client he’s incompetent (nicely, of course) or simply let the error go through, potentially damaging my reputation.

The following is a list of what an editor will do for your manuscript. Note the parallel construction of all the items in the list (editors are big on parallel construction).

• Check and correct spelling, punctuation, subject-verb agreement, capitalization, use of italics, coordination of tenses, use of person, names of people and places, structure of parallel elements, and other matters of grammar and orthography
  
  
• Check that references and footnotes are consistent in form and contain all the needed information
  
  
• Check that all references and footnotes are cited in the text and appear on the page or at the end of the text
  
  
• Introduce abbreviations and use them consistently
  
  
• Impose consistent spelling and usage throughout (for example, don’t allow ml and mL as abbreviations for milliliter in the same manuscript)
  
  
• Query anything that seems wrong or suspicious (for example, if you state that something weighs 1 gram, which is equal to 28 ounces, the editor should recognize that you’ve got it backwards and change or query it)
  
  
• Question word use if the intended meaning is in doubt or unclear (see 4C in the Grammar Quiz, complementary versus complimentary)
  
  
• Check and correct headings, fonts, and other typographical styles (for example, check that level 1 heads are all capitals, level 2 heads are bold, level 3 heads are italic)