Copyeditor’s Folly

Freelancers’ marketing commonly resorts to a rhetorical question. They’ll open their website, say, with, "Why do you need the services of a copyeditor?" Then follow with some aggressive prose about making communication sparkle and shine.

That the question doesn’t posit the profession’s demand as self-evident disturbs me. One rarely can claim a faulty valve repaired that is obviously broken, but everyone knows what is right about our language and gets away with knowing it? As the need for a plumber in certain instances goes without question, so too should the need for a copyeditor.

The urge to declare worth rhetorically comes from the nature of copyeditors’ work as both descriptive and prescriptive. (Not, we hope, from issues of esteem.) The copyeditor needs context to discover the solution to punctuation problems. Sometimes the copyeditor even needs to learn the author’s intent. Then with each prescription, the copyeditor disclaims thus: based on the information and prior treatments, plus the desired outcome and your given creative direction, I think A is a solution to the problem, though B might work equally well.

But the client hires for the prescription. They want solutions that can be applied consistently, standardized. Perplexed about how to market for the fixed and the fluid, the copyeditor markets by rhetorical claim, as if the Why? is commonly understood veil. The device seems weak. Maybe it works. I don’t know.

Even dictionaries claim little more than their descriptive value, as in Houghton Mifflin’s American Heritage College Dictionary, "A dictionary documents a language at a particular point in time." In a copy department or creative atmosphere, one would expect conversation to come of situations with no fixed solution. Alas conversation is rare; people still believe in a right and a wrong and turn to the published works, or the copyeditor, for either.

Copyeditors, we’re not selling perfect grammar and spelling, though it comes with the package, we’re selling modern usage; naturally, I within the realm of my expertise.

Thanks to commenters on Jan Freeman’s recent "The Word" column in the Boston Globe for inspiring this post. Also thanks to a family friend; talking about my job at a holiday party reminded me that there is inspiration in my work.