The Copyeditor's Handbook: A Guide for Book Publishing and Corporate Communications

"I’ve saved the best for last. Let me give you a little background. The Copyeditor’s Handbook was originally intended as a companion piece to The Chicago Manual of Style . Are you familiar with Chicago ? I talked about Merriam-Webster’s being the dictionary of record for American publishers. The Chicago Manual of Style is the style guide of record for American publishers and many other companies too. Pretty much anybody who publishes—and basically every company is a publisher, even if they only put out business cards. The Chicago Manual of Style is eminently useful in terms of rules about how to punctuate, when to spell out a word and when to abbreviate, when to spell out a number and when to use a numeral, how to be consistent. But it is a compendium of information about how to create a book, and there is a lot of information in there that is not applicable to an editor. I used to assign it as a textbook in my editing classes, but ended up only using a portion of the book in class. The last copy I bought cost $65, so it’s a bit of an investment. I felt kind of bad about making people spend so much money, and I wished that the University of Chicago Press , the publisher, would create an abridged version that is useful primarily for editors and leave all the technical book making material aside. Then, somebody came along and suggested creating a companion book. It was going to be published as a companion book for Chicago , but, for some reason, the deal fell through and the University of California Press published it. I met the author. She actually was a guest speaker in my class a couple of times, because she is local. I was very glad about that because if you’re going to have just one book on a desert island and you are a writer, I would say this is the book to have. It basically does what I thought Chicago should do, and distils all the basic information, like when you capitalise a word and when you lowercase it. Technical details like this that, when you use them correctly, mark you as a careful writer. Like the Jane Straus book, it’s a workbook. It has chapters on specific topics and then there are exercises after each chapter. It’s very well organised, very clearly written — and in an engaging way. It’s not intimidating. The Chicago Manual of Style is intimidating. This is just very accessible. Even though it’s called The Copyeditor’s Handbook, I find it useful for anybody who writes or edits. Yes, every single person who writes in English, or at least American English, should be required to own this book and read it, and demonstrate that they’ve read it. It should be like getting a driver’s license. Before you can post a blog, before you can write an email, you need to have a writer’s license! And this is the test. This book is the test. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . The great thing about the internet and technology is that everybody gets to be a writer, and the awful thing about the internet and technology is that everybody gets to be a writer. People think that just because they know how to type they know how to write, but, again, go ahead and type away all you want, but if people can’t understand what you’re writing, then you’ve failed and you need to work on your craft, just as with any other endeavour. Every writing style is correct, if that’s the way that you intend to communicate. Whether it succeeds, that’s another matter. I chose all these books carefully. They represent an array of different types of resources, but they need not be read, or consulted, in any particular order. I included a dictionary, a usage book and a grammar book and I included a stylebook—plus Spunk & Bite for kicks—because those are different issues, and writers need to attend to them all."