It's been about a year since I was asked to do serious copyediting.
Oh sure, people have asked me to proofread this or that -- but mostly they just want to know if they sound like an idiot or not, and occasionally they want me to tell them if they need semicolons. (You know who you are and no, no matter how much you may want to add in some more semicolons, you don't need them.)
But this weekend I sat down to professionally copyedit a piece. This is a process that involves OCD-like attention to continuity of formatting, style, spacing, hypenation . . . So I spent some quality time with my copy of the Chicago Manual of Style. It's two inches thick and a thousand pages long and somehow I find the whole damn thing fascinating.
Read it cover to cover? Never. But there's all these little sparkling jewels of duties of the editor in manuscript preparation and codified punctuation formatting and --
I should really stop before I bore everyone to tears.
Back to copyediting.
