the internship, part four

October 24th, 2007

Every other Tuesday, and anytime the department couldn’t find work for me to do, I helped the editors in the legal department. Though its editing team, made up of three people, ran similarly to mine, this team had its own manual and set of rules. The first few times I worked there, I took my things, and I physically moved to a desk in the department. Every new project brought up new questions, and I wanted to be close to the people who could answer them.

My desk sat between Brenda and Linda, both of whom were in their late twenties. There, I was not surrounded by high cubicle walls but by low, unassuming ones. Brenda suggested I bring headphones so I could listen to music while working; most editors did this. But the real fringe benefit of working here was the window. To my right, a huge wall window provided a view of the neighboring building and the cars that drove by. Especially in September and October, I loved getting to see the wind rustling leaves or the rain washing the ground.

At some point in the first few weeks, I was working on a two-week read. Every time legal published a book, the hard copy would be proofread one more time, during the first two weeks following printing. The goal was to find glaring mistakes, not controversial ones. So I worked through a child support book, trying to be alert to capitalization errors or missed punctuation. One issue that kept coming up was hyphens—or rather, the lack of hyphens.

I came to the company with strong opinions on hyphenation, opinions that had been formed in editing class discussions: when two modifying words preceded a noun, and those modifiers were not qualifiers, not –ly words, and not clearly open compounds, they were hyphenated. Examples would be words like “coffee-press sale” or “white-tent meeting.” Skimming through the two-week read, though, I found repeated examples where the modifiers were not hyphenated, but left open.

First I marked these words, assuming they had been somehow overlooked. Then I just put post-its on them, planning to ask Brenda or Linda later. Finally I reached a point of self-doubting and confusion: had I totally misunderstood hyphens? There was no way all these words could be mistakes, not in an already-published book. So I went to Linda.

“It’s hard to explain,” she told me. “We follow Chicago Manual of Style on this: we hyphenate when it would cause confusion not to.”

Her answer didn’t satisfy me as I mentally noted CMS 7.90 and its elaborate list of when and when not to hyphenate. “Let’s ask Brenda,” she said.

We walked the five or so steps to Brenda’s desk, and she had little explanation to offer either. “We always leave ‘child care’ open,” she said. “And we never hyphenate this.” Then she paused. “But honestly, this is just the kind of thing we have arguments over. Someone will want to hyphenate a participle and an adjective that come before a noun.”

I opened up my CMS and pointed to a rule. “It says here that you’re supposed to.”

Brenda and Lisa didn’t respond; they just looked at my book.

“Unless you just have some kind of house style that trumps this?” I suggested.

“Right,” Brenda agreed. “Why am I even looking at CMS? Our style is slowly evolving, and a lot of it is just what Linda and I know in our heads. But that style trumps CMS. Exactly.”

“OK. So should I remove all these edits I made?”

“No, go ahead and flag them on top, like questions. We’ll take a look at them. When you’re not sure, just flag it on top.”

And so, in one thirty-minute discussion, I learned editing lesson #2: copyediting is, largely, subjective. Here, I followed one set of guidelines/style; in the other editorial department, a slightly different one. Despite a general submission to The Chicago Manual of Style, each department and department member had different preferences and quirks. In later weeks, I learned a managing editor liked to add an apostrophe in decade references (ex. 1990’s), despite the CMS rule against it; the assistant editors strongly disagreed, but managers trump assistants, so it stayed.

What I had once found so enjoyable about editing—the ability to know rules and implement them—was slowly unwinding before me. In my free time, when I would see a mistake in published material at this point, I would wonder if the company’s house style allowed the deviation from traditional rules. I felt far less sure of my knowledge than I had before taking the internship.