The farther I get from actually doing the job, the less I like to think about petty style points, which used to take up so much of most days and which weren’t as enjoyable to navigate as syntactical work. There’s a lot of pride available, and at stake, in knowing how to handle that/which question and whether and when to use four-point rather than three-point ellipses (and when to hyphenate four-point), but syntactical work is where the most challenging fun is located. All of that said, style points are a bedrock of copyediting, the one aspect of the job that you have to address and (for that matter) that MEs are most likely to check, so I’d be remiss not to discuss them some of the time.
When I mentioned that bibliographies are easy, I was forgetting the ones that aren’t. Some do set you a test. Case One: Quite a few mscripts are heavy with legal citations, and you would have to be a lawyer to be comfortable with them, which means I never was. When the author was a lawyer, I put them on their honour – I didn’t touch them except to scan for typos and inconsistencies, and even when I found something, I did no more than query it. More problematic were when authors mixed legal citations with other kinds. It went against the grain to mingle two different systems in a single biblio, but that was the approach I eventually took. It looked awful when I did that – in hindsight, it would have been better to separate the two types into distinct biblios, if the author already hadn’t. If there’s a rule for whether you can or should do that, I never encountered it. Point is if I was inventing a system, that’s what I’d know enough to do today.
Case Two: Foreign-language citations. I’ve seen as many as five different languages in a single bibliography, and two or three different alphabets, and throw in Chinese characters besides that. As with legal cites, the best approach is not to reinvent. It’s surprising, I’d add, how quickly you can get good at proofreading foreign-language cites. The same words and contractions tend to come up repeatedly. Even so, you’re editing blind.
Case Three: government archives. In Canada, which is my home turf, the blinking-light acronym is usually LAC (Library and Archives Canada), but every country/province/state has its own. Every author takes a different approach to them, and there is little to be gained from reinventing whatever approach they’ve taken. I do insist that LAC (or whatever) be the first item in the citation, which often means moving it from the end of the cite to the beginning – why, I gasp, did the author put it at the end? – but if they want to do the rest of a citation backwards, let them go ahead, given that it must make sense to somebody. Some citation systems are more difficult to handle than others, and some come up so rarely that there is little point in trying to remember them. I’ve known United Nations citations to blind me with my own tears, they make so little sense. Portuguese government archives? How often will I have to know that system?, which leads to the question of how soon I can forget it now that I’ve learned it.
Case Four: A lot of authors divide up their biblio into subcategories: newspapers, books, journals or magazines, archival sources. You almost hope they do, because it’s easier if all items of one type are going to be in one place. The only drawback is that it can make your life hell when it comes to checking notes and in-text citations against the biblio. More later.
Case Five: Multiple contributors to a collection, with multiple biblios. Do you apply the same style to all the biblios? I can say quite decisively that it depends. First question is whether the volume editor tried to do that. If she did, you’d better be ready to help her along. For a template, use the editor’s own contribution – she has always made one. But there are cases where it isn’t necessary to smooth out multiple biblios. If the volume editor allowed the contributors their own way, you should let them continue on with it.
Biblio horror stories, I’ve had a few. A fine arts author who sent in a 400-pager that included every last reprint of a given article, including multiple translations of each (English, Spanish, Italian, German, Russian, and so on). Some of the items were a page long. He seemed to delight in how long he could extend them. Consistency went out the window with this guy. It took weeks. Another author who did the same thing and had it typed up by a grad student who, as it turned out, was ESL Chinese. Again, it took weeks. When I spot-checked it against internet sources, I found that not a single item was accurate, not one. I sent him a memo attached to my cover letter that began, “You need to brace yourself for some criticism …” and boy did I let him have it, which I hardly ever do.
A final case: I hesitate to call it a challenge, because it turned out to be easy and fun. It was theatre history, a 300-page biblio, with multiple sources – public and private archives, newspapers and magazines, private collections, interviews, and so on. All alphabetized into a single header: BIBLIOGRAPHY. By the time I was done, it was less than 10 pages. Gad that was fun, and I let myself enjoy it without trepidation since it was the second-last book I was going to handle for that house. (Copyeditors love to delete material, which takes less time than fixing it, but they rarely get the chance to do it wholesale.) Newspaper articles? They’re all full-cited in the notes, so out they go. Magazines? The same – out they go. Private collections? No point citing them at all, since they aren’t open to the public. Just list the collections at the top of the biblio (at this point, what biblio?). Nothing much left now but journals, and a list of the newspapers consulted, of which there were five. Later on, after the biblio, I cut the 200 pages of notes down to 50. That mscript took some recasting.
Fake It Till You Make It
It’s never a good idea to lie or exaggerate on a résumé, but person-to-person? I encourage you to overplay your skills, shining a dazzling light on them in the hope of blinding clients or prospective employers to how little you actually know. There’s nothing wrong with doing it, and the people you’re pitching yourself to will know you’re doing it anyway, because they did it too, at least a little, back when. It’s the nature of the working world. But like I said, of course never on a résumé or c.v.
And I would add the proviso that while you’re overselling yourself, you should be reading the Chicago Manual of Style under the covers at night, with a flashlight. Pull some all-nighters for a while. Read the sections about documentation, and hyphens, and whatever else. I wish I’d done that, because pretending you know enough is only valid as long as you aren’t simultaneously trying to convince yourself that you already do.