Mechanics as I mean it here is a catch-all for everything besides grammar and syntax that a copyeditor is expected to address. To start with, every publisher is going to have a style sheet for you to follow, and a CE will be expected to keep the text in that lane or show good reason why not. And since no style sheet is going to cover every issue you encounter, you’ll need to judge how to handle all the occasions that it doesn’t and make note of them by adding them to the style sheet. Add to that, the CE needs to double-check all the apparatus that encases or infests a mscript, starting with the Contents page (it’s no longer called a Table of Contents), and, beyond that, the layout and consistency of captions, tables, indices, callouts, and basically everything else that precedes or follows the text or is embedded in it. If a book has notes and biblio, you have to review those for accuracy and consistency (more about documentation later). Also, the publisher is likely to expect some fact checking from you – they never used to, back in pencil edit days, before the internet, when it typically involved a trip to the library or at least a phone call, but some of that is expected now. (More about fact checking later.) There’s more to mechanics than that, besides. If mechanics sounds like scut work, I haven’t explained it well. It can actually be pleasant break, once you’re comfortable with all that it involves. I’ve known MEs who hoard bibliographies for Friday afternoons, when they want relax into the weekend, and a hundred pages of notes can actually be enjoyable if they’re in any decent condition at all, or close to the publisher’s baseline for what is acceptable. (They can be a weeks-long nightmare if they’re not.)
It wasn’t quite a nightmare, but I remember this occasion because of how close we came to one, at the house. Remember here that anyone who reads an academic volume is going to turn first to the bibliography to see if their own work has been tapped. They can’t help themselves. I copyedited a Canadian history mscript, another one. For his sources, the author had relied heavily on a renowned Canadian historian, the deans of deans in his field, a universally acknowledged Great Man of Canadian historical letters. And prolific? You try keeping track. Heck everyone quotes him, and for that matter, everyone knows how to spell his name – it’s an easy one. The proofs came in, and as standard practice I checked the biblio’s alphabetization. It’s a standard check, and this one went the way it always does – a couple of errors, no more, easy to fix, no worries. I sent the proofs back as a zip file. Then … I don’t know why I went back to the proofs a few days later, but it was for something unrelated – I was probably checking something in the notes – and while the file was back open, I scrolled down at random, and … POP!!! … I called the ME, which I hardly ever do, but an email might not have been quick enough. “The proofs haven’t been shipped out yet? That’s good. In the biblio, page 382, we left the T out of the guy’s name.” I waited a minute while she opened the file. I could hear her turn pale, really. I waited out her exhalation: “Nice catch.” And she fixed it on the spot, so it came out correctly in the biblio: “Morton, Desmond.”
SIDEBAR: Harassed? Embarrassed? Those are on a short list of words I always look up. I have no idea why one of them has one r and the other two r’s. They rhyme, for heaven’s sake. English, plainly, doesn’t always make sense. It turns out that they’re both from Old French, late 16th or early 17th century, but that doesn’t explain much. No sense delving beyond that. The point is, they are two words I always look up, out of sheer trepidation, and after a while you’ll have your own list of words in that category.