The Copyeditor s Handbook A Guide for Book Publishing and Corporate Communications Second Edition

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This book is neither a dictionary nor a grammar book. It is a stylebook -- or, alternatively, a style guide. If, for example, you wrote Ten Downing Street, Ten Downing St., Number 10 Downing Street, or No. 10 Downing St., you would be grammatically correct in every case, but you would be stylistically incorrect in all. The way to write this address, home of the British prime minister, is 10 Downing Street. Similarly, the correct style for the address of the White House, home of the U.S. president, is 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, not 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. In other words, a stylebook suggests preferred alternatives to the varieties of ways you can write things. Grammar books generally do not do this. The genesis of this book was a need for something like it. In Singapore and Hong Kong, we could not find a comprehensive style guide that addressed local issues -- regionalisms, romanization systems, names of local institutions. As a consequence, we decided to write our own . We tried to write a stylebook that would be of general interest to Chinese everywhere, so the style presented here is intended to be universal for Greater China (Preface).

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David Foster Wallace had a notoriously vexed relationship with copyeditors, which led D. T. Max to draw a natural conclusion: the exhausting round of corrections to the page proofs of Infinite Jest must have been due to bad copyediting. Much evidence, however, suggests that these final edits were a more complex affair than this version can account for. I argue that the copyediting in fact played a key role in the evolution of the book, by giving Wallace a chance to consider the line-by-line effects he wanted the novel to have on the reader – ideas he would then apply in his extensive round of proof corrections. Finalizing those corrections was in fact the work of a fairly harmonious team that Wallace would continue to work with over the next few years. His revisions even give insight into the important narrative theory question of how he envisioned the author-reader relationship, because they were made at a time when he would have been most clearly focused on shaping the reader’s responses. The patterns of his edits thus allow preliminary reflections on how he saw himself interacting with the reader through his words, and on his expectations about the reader’s work that are baked right into the text.

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