The Secret Life of Copy Editors

I enjoyed Lori Fradkin expose on the life of a copy editor. Although I've edited stories by some of the most famous journalists in the world, I know that my blog is littered with errors. Why, you ask? Because every writer needs an editor, and this site's a one-man operation. I don't go back and read most of what I write on here, which is why I don't mind my readers acting as my copy desk, provided -- as Lori would say -- they're not douche bags about it.

Fradkin writes of the increasingly thankless profession of copyediting:

The job has its perks -- an accumulation of random knowledge, for instance -- but it also has its side effects ... Once you train yourself to spot errors, you can’t not spot them. You can’t simply shut off the careful reading when you leave the office. You notice typos in novels, missing words in other magazines, incorrect punctuation on billboards. You have nightmares that your oversight turned Mayor Bloomberg into a "pubic" figure.

Another downside of the job is that only your mistakes are apparent. The catches are basically invisible. No one will look at an edited article and think, I am certain that, once upon a time, there was a double quote where there should have been a single, and a wise person fixed the issue for my benefit. But if you let a “their” slip through in the place of a “there,” you are a complete moron. And if you are working online, commenters will let you know so. Then your boss will let you know that the commenters are saying so in case you didn’t see it yourself.