Beyond the Elements of Style

Shipping the Work to India

A recent article in Business Week talks about more and more copyediting being outsourced from Europe and North America to India, because of the lower costs of having editing done there.

It’s not a new issue: faithful readers will remember that I addressed it once already in my post titled Happy Labor Day. But if Business Week has something to say about it, then it’s more of a major issue than it was when I addressed it in 2006.

My friend and colleague, Geoff Hart, has an interesting take on it that I think is absolutely right on:

We’ll never be able to compete with Indian editors on the basis of price, and competing based on quality is unlikely, at least in the long term. Let’s not forget that many Indians are every bit as skilled with English as we are, since it’s often their native language. And with roughly four times the population of North America (and probably a comparable ratio for Europe), there will potentially be four times as many good editors — and four times as many bad ones, of course.

We can offer only two things that Indian editors can’t reliably provide: skill in our local dialect of English, and proximity to our clients. The former is one of those things that translators like to debate, namely whether you can produce prose indistinguishable from that produced by a skilled local. The best translators believe you can, but in my experience (with French), they’re fooling themselves (i.e., judging others based on their own skills). Very few translators can hide their native tongue well enough to fool me. I’ve heard the same observation from several full-time translators whose opinions I respect.

Proximity is no longer such an issue, particularly for those of us who earn more than 90% of our income from clients on other continents whom we’ll never meet. But for some clients, it’s important: they like the ability to phone during regular working hours or request an office visit or otherwise know that we’re available on a moment’s notice. To retain such clients, we need to give top-notch customer service so they have no reason whatsoever to look elsewhere. That’s true of all clients, by the way: the easier we are to work with, the more human nature (i.e., laziness) makes it likely that clients won’t look elsewhere.

Unfortunately, many clients and potential clients see editing as a commodity, and commodities will always be purchased at the lowest price. In the context of this discussion, that means India. These clients aren’t worthy of our time — there are still clients who appreciate our value, and will pay for it. But let’s be realistic: basic copyediting skills, such as fixing subject-verb accords and typos, really are a commodity service. Any editor worthy of the name should be able to fix these problems.

The only thing that allows us to rise above our colleagues and command a premium price is the ability to provide specialized services, and that means we need to find a niche where our expertise is worth the extra money. For me, that’s science editing, and specifically the subset that relates to journal articles written by non-English scientists. I provide heavy substantive and developmental editing (based on 20+ years of working with journals and learning their criteria) along with polishing the language, and for people who need what I provide, a nonspecialist simply can’t compete.

So the question to ask yourself is the following: What do I offer beyond a commodity service? Market that value-add to your clients. It’s no guarantee that you’ll never lose a client to an Indian or other editor with equally specialized skills, but it does reduce the risk.

There’s far more editing work out there than any one group of editors can handle — the trick is to find it. At some point, the amount of editing work required domestically in India will become sufficiently large that Indian editors will begin satisfying the needs of their domestic market first. That should relieve some of the pressure on us Westerners.

Of course, getting from here to there will be difficult. One useful option is to begin capitalizing on another major outsourcing trend, which is seeing much technical writing being shipped to India, where much software and hardware development is going on. (Ditto for China.) All writers need an editor, and for Indian companies (or branches of Western companies) that will be selling their products around the world, localization (culturally sensitive translation) of their documentation will become important. That’s where editors can become extremely useful.

The mills may indeed be closing, but there’s always something you can do with an improved and focused skill-set. Bear that in mind — and visit Geoff online at www.geoff-hart.com. Then you’ll be … beyond the elements of style!

To Be Edited … or Not To Be Edited?

Okay, so here’s the thing. No one likes being edited. Any author, any writer who tells you that he or she enjoys the process, is lying. That’s all that there is to it.

Second truth: everyone needs to be edited. Everyone. Every writer has idiosyncracies at best and errors at worst, and there is no way that the writer can be aware of them all. The fact is that one editor probably won’t be aware of them all, either, but he or she has a lot better chance of it than does the writer.

So where does that leave you?

You’ve written your book. You’re about to embark on a search for an agent or publisher. You decide that the first thing to do is to get it — your masterpiece, that is — professionally edited. Right?

Wrong.

I’m not saying that your book doesn’t need editing; au contraire, I’m quite willing to bet that it needs a lot of editing. But that same amount of editing is also going to be very expensive, and it may not be the best use of your funds at this time.

Instead, consider this: what you really want to do is capture the attention and interest of a literary agent or of a publisher. That’s your real goal here, not having a picture-perfect manuscript.

What will you be sending out in your quest for arousing that interest? Certainly not the entire manuscript! Instead, you’ll be sending out a proposal, which will include — at most — three chapters of the manuscript. It will also include other essentials, such as a synopsis, an analysis of competing books already in the marketplace, a statement of your platform, an outline, and other components.

You’re starting to get the idea: I can tell. Your first order of business is to make this proposal the best proposal it can possibly be. So by all means have it edited — and have those first three chapters edited, also — and hold off on the whole manuscript until someone has asked you to send it to them.

You can have someone write the proposal — it’s one of the things that I do for clients — but that’s relatively expensive. Consider writing your own and then sending it to a top-notch editor. You’ll pay up to a couple thousand dollars, but you won’t be in for too much; and if no one asks for it (perish the thought!), you’ll still be able to pay next month’s rent!

And then you’ll be … beyond the elements of style!

When Shouldn’t You Sign The Contract?

It’s an unconventional thought, but there are times when a writer or editor should not make a sale. When ethics becomes an issue for you, then you are forced to turn down certain clients or publications.

We’ve talked a lot about honesty, and here are some situations when honesty may be an issue with a sale:

• You don’t have the best solution for that client.
• The new business could harm the business of existing clients.
• The client asks you to engage in an unethical or dishonest practice.
• The client’s practices do not meet your standards for ethical behavior.

How about the issue of quality – of standing behind your service or product?

• The client makes unreasonable workload or pricing demands and it might not be worth what you could charge to work with them (this is an issue of the client’s quality).

• You won’t have enough time to do the job up to your normal standards.
• The client’s product is not up to your standards of acceptable quality.

While it may be counter-intuitive to turn down a sale, there are times when it is the right thing to do.

And then you’ll be … beyond the elements of style!

The Art of Rewriting

“The beautiful part of writing is that you don’t have to get it right the first time, unlike, say, a brain surgeon. You can always do it better, find the exact word, the apt phrase, the leaping simile.” (Robert Cormier)

So you’ve finished your book. That’s what it feels like, isn’t it? You’ve gotten it all down, finally, your opus, and it’s finished. What you probably don’t want to hear at this point is that it’s not; but that’s the truth. The first draft is finished; and that’s well worth celebrating. But a lot of the real work has just begun.

Many authors dread rewrites, but I’d like to suggest that it’s not something to be avoided or done under duress, like a visit to the dentist. No: a rewrite is your opportunity to take your story or article and make it shine.

While every rewrite is going to be different, there are a few nuts and bolts that you can look for in any manuscript:

• Look for patterns: If you have a tendency to write in threes (”her hair was soft, vibrant, and beautiful”), you’ll want to alternate those descriptions with other ways of saying the same thing. If you constantly use sentence fragments, break that up a little. Always write in long sentences? Throw in a few shorter ones. Patterns tend to make readers’ eyes glaze over; always keep them wondering what you’ll be up to next, and you’ll keep them turning the pages.
• Watch out for the misplaced apostrophe! Look for words that end in “s” and determine which are plurals, which are possessives, and which are contractions; then apply the appropriate rule. (In general, plurals do not take an apostrophe while possessives do, the most notable exception being “its” as a possessive – “it’s” is a contraction of “it is.”)
• Don’t let MS Word be the boss!The spellchecker in your word processing program will no doubt help you find the most egregious errors; but make sure that you go beyond them, and especially take the built-in grammar checker with a very large grain of salt.
• If you’re writing fiction, is the story arc clear? Are timelines correct? Did you check to see that someone who has blue eyes in chapter one does not suddenly switch to brown in chapter eighteen?
• If you’re writing nonfiction, is your point clear? Do you have an introduction, several main points, and conclusion?
• Are you using the same vocabulary over and over again? (Most of us do) Remember, your thesaurus is your friend. Don’t try to sound too pedantic or exotic, but as is true of other patterns, the same word usage becomes tiring and may cause your book to be less appreciated than it should be!

You should do at least one rewrite before your manuscript leaves your desk. Knowing that you’ll do a rewrite leaves you free to relax and just write the first time around, knowing that you’ll have plenty of time to clean it up later.

It’s also important to let as much time as possible elapse between your first and second drafts. When you wrote your first draft, you were caught up in the experience and in the content; you need time and distance to be able to assess your work with an impartial eye.

Once you’re comfortable with your rewrite(s), it’s time to send it out. To a potential agent or publisher? No, no, a thousand times no! Now is the time for a workshop (see links for two online possibilities) or a local writer’s group. Have other people look at your work, critique it, tear it apart if necessary; then you can regroup and do (gulp!) yet another rewrite. But don’t skip the first one: you are wasting the resources of the group if you have them fixing the nuts and bolts mentioned here – fixing things that you easily could have fixed yourself.

Some people prefer not to go the workshop route but rather directly to a freelance editor. Again, I urge you to send your second or third draft, not your first one, to the editor you choose. I cannot tell you how many manuscripts sent to Customline Wordware for editing that would have been far less expensive had the author first done a second draft and fixed the obvious errors! I don’t mind, particularly; but I expect that saving money is something we’d all like to do.

Remember to approach rewrites as you might a friend who is about to give you advice that may be annoying, but that you know to be true. The advice is what matters… and it will bring you beyond the elements of style!