RunSilentRunDeep
Avid Reader
- Joined
- Oct 20, 2012
- Posts
- 14
I'm sitting here, going through an author's draft. I see spelling errors, punctuation errors, things I can fix with a keystroke or two.
I also see passages that confuse me. A passage might have a word that I didn't understand until I looked it up. It might have a brief flashback, whose timeline is badly muddled with respect to the rest of the story. I'm not going to solve these things. If they're to be clarified, the author needs to make a call about this, that, or the other things. And if I am to help the author do that, I should give them some queries.
For you editors who try to stick to light copy editing ... how do you handle queries?
Do you simply leave those passages alone, and return the edited draft to the author without comment?
Do you have a way to flag them (as "passages of concern," so to speak)? Do you flag them all? Only some?
If you actually ask the "question" (the query), do you have a way to flag that as a query?
Finally - would these ways of "flagging" things work in a text (.txt) file, or would they require a file that can handle more complex formatting (such as comment boxes or text boxes)?
I'm ever-so-clever, I could certainly invent a wheel for this. But if some of you are already actively using such a wheel, I'd love to know about it!
Thanks!
RSRD
I also see passages that confuse me. A passage might have a word that I didn't understand until I looked it up. It might have a brief flashback, whose timeline is badly muddled with respect to the rest of the story. I'm not going to solve these things. If they're to be clarified, the author needs to make a call about this, that, or the other things. And if I am to help the author do that, I should give them some queries.
For you editors who try to stick to light copy editing ... how do you handle queries?
Do you simply leave those passages alone, and return the edited draft to the author without comment?
Do you have a way to flag them (as "passages of concern," so to speak)? Do you flag them all? Only some?
If you actually ask the "question" (the query), do you have a way to flag that as a query?
Finally - would these ways of "flagging" things work in a text (.txt) file, or would they require a file that can handle more complex formatting (such as comment boxes or text boxes)?
I'm ever-so-clever, I could certainly invent a wheel for this. But if some of you are already actively using such a wheel, I'd love to know about it!
Thanks!
RSRD
