Crenshaw's Books & Decks

This is a basic introduction to editing, no matter you are a beginner editor, a peer-reviewer or just want to edit your own texts.

One expects the book of a professional editor to be good, easy to understand, and well organised, and, generally speaking, this is the case.

Although many of the things Dunham recommends are a bit too obvious (especially if writing is part of your job or just your job) they should never be forgotten. At times, it is painful seeing academics doing the sort of mistakes that Dunham mentions in this book. Actually, these are some of the mistakes I do make while writing for work, or writing a review.

An editor basically reads a text at least twice, and systematically checks the relevance and precision of the content, whether the focus of the author is there or not, if the grammar and orthography of the work are correct, and if the language used is good or not. Editors follow style or criteria rules and guidelines generally imposed by the publisher, although if you are self-editing you can create yours to keep consistency while writing. Then, comes the hard task of checking things systematically, for which you create a checklist or task-list to avoid tricks and treacheries of the eye and the mind and make sure that everything you should have checked is, indeed, checked.

The structure of the book follows this sort of order.    

The book is clearly written, without any pomposity or technical jargon. A priori, I thought this would be a dry book, but I found it to be not only useful and practical, but an enjoyable light reading as well.

The chapter I find most interesting and useful is chapter 9 (The Editor's Tools), which not only provides us with a commented bibliography and a list of online resources, but also an example of check-list. I also enjoyed Dunham's comments on the relationship with editors and authors in chapter 9, which are great to level your head when correcting somebody else's work or peer-reviewing, something that I tend to forget because I get exasperated by some people's "crappola". And also his comments on the use of Wikipedia for references.

Some of his comments on common grammatical and orthographical mistakes are spot on and very easy to understand, therefore, very useful. I also like some of the explanations Dunham gives about confusing (fusing) words. I noticed that, while he explains the rule on how to use brackets, just to put an example, he says it in a way in which brackets are used and incorporated into the explanation without the need of any example. Cool, even tubular :)

The book examines and includes all types of editing. You will find similar challenges and methodical approach to editing any type of text. However, editing for a newspaper, for an academic journal or the Government are intrinsically different as they target different readers, and they do so in different ways regarding language used and length and depth of the text. You cannot expect the general reader to understand technical stuff, but you expect academics working on a given discipline to deal easily with that stuff without the need of dumbing down their writing. So, I would have liked a chapter devoted to the challenges that different publications and texts demand from the editor, and the way editors face them. 
 
Some of the explanations about punctuation were just sketched and not clear enough or not well explained, for example, the use of Em and En dashes.

Although the book is well organised and I like the structure, a few things were off, to me. I would have placed chapter 9 after chapter 10, included some of the subjects mentioned in the appendix in chapter 10 and enlarge them, and offer a separate bibliography and resources section. Besides, the bibliography mentioned is a bit old. Even though the books are classics, or manuals that any editor should have, there must be most updated improved editions, and  why not including other specialised books dealing with specific matters?  

I found odd that the some articles mentioned in the endnotes have no pages mentioned. They come from newspapers and other periodical publications, I guess. I was taught, that even when the news comes from a newspaper, you provide the reader with the page where the article is found. That is for academic writing, of course. There must be a reason why pages are not mentioned with those articles. Were they retrieved online? Is there any rule about this that professional editors follow?

Now, how much quoting is too much? Well... too many quotes is always too much. Elements of Style and Words into Type are mentioned ad nauseam, so I ended wondering, if these books are so great, why bothering writing anything else?  Dunham is a professional experienced editor, so I wanted to hear his voice loud and distinctly clear, even if he shares the same opinions and approaches his work in very similar ways other editors do. In fact, Dunham shines when he does so, when he is his own self, and speaks from his own experience without paraphrasing or quoting anybody.

Most of the grammar elements and common mistakes he discuses in his book are great, but we can find that sort of information in any basic grammar book, like Practical English Usage or a Practical English Grammar, just to mention two examples of exhaustive reliable books coming from Oxford University. However, I missed a chapter on footnoting or endnoting; too many writers and academics do not use notes properly, they do not know where to place them, or what sort of information to include in them. The same can be said of creating indexes, a bibliography, glossary or your own style sheet. Said differently, how would an editor approach endnotes, footnotes, bibliography, indexes and glossaries in a given text? How to edit those? 

IN SHORT

I found the reading good and entertaining, and, as a first good approach to editing, a great book with plenty of useful items of advice. I was expecting an ABC of editing, but for that you have to go elsewhere.