Illuminating Manuscripts: How Copyeditors Shine a Light on Scholarship

“Like good theatre lighting, good copyediting should not draw attention to itself,” Robert Lewis tells me. The simile is apt, and not just because copyeditors are so often credited in authors’ acknowledgments for making the text shine. But the self-effacing nature of the discipline sometimes leads us to take it for granted.

So picture me in my stagehand garb, turning those floodlights on MQUP’s quietest heroes. Lewis, one of the dozens of copyeditors on our roster, has been wielding his red pen for us for twenty-five years. “Although I have a degree in English literature,” he says, “it was teaching writing that best equipped me for professional copyediting because it required that I be able to explain matters of grammar and sentence structure that I had previously only intuited.”

Intuition will take a copyeditor pretty far. The way I see it, the primary role of a copyeditor is to act as a text’s most careful and most generous reader, uncovering any places where the author’s meaning is unclear and eliminating those barriers to understanding. Anyone can tell when they don’t understand a sentence; it’s in the fixing that editors deploy their finely honed expertise. In the words of Eleanor Gasparik, a full-time book editor since 2008: “I’m not an academic, nor typically very (or at all) familiar with the author’s field, but I should be able to understand and follow what the author is wanting to get across. If I can’t, due to issues of clarity, continuity, comprehensiveness, writing style, or such, that’s when my professional copyediting skills kick in.”

At a university press, these skills are crucial. Think of a scholar putting the finishing touches on a manuscript – years in the writing, perhaps, but decades in the making, an achievement that has grown out of a career of reading, teaching, synthesizing, dreaming, iterating. What knowledge an MQUP author holds in their head is held by no one else until their book is born. The privilege and duty of a university press is to bring that knowledge to the world, and part of that work is to resolve any ambiguity or opacity in the text. “At a university press,” explains Angela Wingfield, “[a copyeditor’s role is] especially important so that the author’s new contribution to his or her field of study can be appreciated.”

“Do no harm?” Gasparik suggests when I ask her about her editing philosophy. And as much as authors sometimes fear the schoolmarmish judgment that editorial markup might imply, I always find that MQUP copyeditors are on the author’s side, first and foremost. “I work for and with the author and the publisher/client – it’s a collaboration,” Gasparik adds, and she aims to perform her part in that collaboration with “good judgment, good sense – and a good sense of humour.”

When an author pushes back on her edits, Wingfield “bow[s] to their knowledge of the subject and the pertinent jargon.” She explains, “If in doubt, I look it up – the meaning of a word, a grammatical point, etc.” She sees the preservation of the author’s voice as central to her work. Lewis agrees: “On the one hand, there are writerly matters that I address in the same manner across the manuscripts that I edit. These many subtle revisions are meant to ensure an ease of reading that comes with polished writing. On the other hand, I strive to emulate the writer’s voice in every respect so that my more comprehensive editorial interventions are invisible to the reader.”

What do some of those comprehensive editorial interventions look like? Different projects have different needs. Lewis copyedited Paul Bramadat’s forthcoming Yogalands, a fascinating and personal look at how curiosity can deepen a yoga practice and help one to reckon with its connections to the real world. Because Yogalands “draws on autoethnographic material to frame the scholarly discussion, the matter of tone takes on importance in ways that it does not in the context of strictly expository prose,” Lewis says. “The tone of Bramadat’s personal reflections ranges from the humorous to the skeptical, so it was necessary to ensure the clarity of what the narrative material communicates given the many possible resonances and implications of anecdote.” While he was carefully attuning his edits to Bramadat’s voice and audience, Lewis was also casting an eye toward structural changes that could invite the reader more comfortably into the text, such as the addition of a glossary of Sanskrit terms.

Wingfield found herself learning new skills when she was working on In the Land of the Lacandón, a forthcoming history of colonial encounter with an isolated Maya community in the form of a comic, by Richard Ivan Jobs and Steven Van Wolputte. “Should the text in the graphic have the same style as that of the accompanying essay?” she wondered. (She opted for a consistent style throughout the volume.) What about alignment and the interaction of text with layout in a graphic panel? Should speech bubbles be consistently enclosed? “The artist advised that he wanted the bubbles ‘open’ in order to allow the narrative to ‘breathe,’” she says. “I agreed with him.”

Readers who have seen Paul Kane’s Travels in Indigenous North America, I.S. MacLaren’s four-volume wrestling match with the infamous artist’s art, writing, and difficult cultural legacy, might wonder how one copyeditor moved all 1.3 million words through her word-polishing mental machinery. Some of the words Gasparik uses to summarize the task: process, logistics, scheduling requirements; negotiation, communication, engagement; patience and understanding; surprises and unknowns. (I can guess the question you are all asking – how long was the style sheet? Fourteen thorough, impeccably crafted pages.) Copyediting this book involved restructuring the author’s introductory note on the text, converting information-dense prose into a table for easier navigation, framing appendices to give readers crucial context and a clear understanding of their purpose, and combing through the author’s (magisterial, comprehensive) 537-page index manuscript. “Ian [MacLaren] cared passionately and deeply about his book, and it was the collaboration and contribution of many that got the project done,” Gasparik says. “Thanks to Ian’s commitment, receptiveness, and perseverance … my experience was more interesting, challenging, educational, and fulfilling than expected or anticipated.”

You won’t be surprised to learn that copyeditors are a resourceful bunch, and they pick up their invaluable skills in diverse venues. Lewis started out teaching freshman composition, but, as a writer himself, he has seen the craft from both sides: “I have been able to improve my editing by writing and polishing my own work. Polishing my first novel recently with an editor introduced me to a whole new set of parameters for the editing of narrative writing, which of course also arises in academic manuscripts.” Gasparik describes her training as “independently put together and deliberately wide-ranging,” incorporating editing, writing, and publishing courses from post-secondary institutions in Edmonton (Grant MacEwan University and the U of A), Vancouver (SFU), and Toronto (George Brown College and TMU). Wingfield names the usual suspects (style manuals, Editors Canada seminars) but also draws on training from the Indexing Society of Canada. “There is something to be learned from each project,” she adds.

One last thought before the house lights come up. Perhaps the less typed about artificial intelligence, the better; suffice it to say that a university press is in the business of connecting human readers with human discoveries. As long as our audience is primarily made up of Homo sapiens, the best person to copyedit our books is, well, a person. So here’s to the wordsmiths – let’s give them their flowers. “At a university press, the story may be a critical analysis or evaluation, communication of ideas or insights, presentation or discussion of research, but it’s still a story,” says Gasparik. And who knows that better than a copyeditor?

Kathleen Fraser, managing editor

This post was expertly copyedited by our associate managing editor, Lisa Aitken. Any mistakes you spot I have sneakily added back in.