Battling the Little Editor in My Head
- slkayne
- Jan 11
- 3 min read
by Sharon Kayne
I’ve been retired for a year now, but apparently, you can take the girl out of the work, but you can’t take the work out of the girl. Because what I did for a living haunts me still, and I’m getting tired of it.
For about the last 30 years, I worked as a writer/editor. I wrote and edited a variety of products—from news stories, features, columns, and reviews, to fact sheets, white papers, and grant requests and reports. And I was pretty good at it. Unfortunately, the little editor in my brain hasn’t retired. She’s still editing away whenever I read anything—billboards, emails, texts, and, sadly, other people’s novels and books. I don’t especially care about the typos I see on billboards (except for the “end-of-year sale” ads that neglect the adjectival hyphens. You need the hyphens, people! It’s not a “year sale,” for heaven’s sake!). And, of course, I’m not OCD enough to let typos in emails and texts get to me. But typos and formatting errors in novels and books do get to me. And I’m tired of it!
I just want to be able to enjoy a good book without having my editor brain pointing out every little error or inconsistency. It’s so annoying to be really into a book when my brain blurts out, “Suddenly we’re switching from smart quotes to hash marks. Argh!” (Lest you think I am making this up, Wikipedia has an entire page on quotation marks, which goes into the difference between “smart” quotation marks and “neutral” marks. It’s a thing. Really.)
Another formatting thing that gets to me is the misuse of em dashes, en dashes, and hyphens. (And, yes, Wikipedia has a whole page on dashes. Read it. I dare you!) And then there are your garden-variety typos, which pretty much every novel will have (even those put out by the big New York publishers, because they’ve all cut back on proofreading to save money, cheap bastards!). Whether it’s a missing word, an extra word, or just the wrong word (lord save us from the confusion of homophones!), typos bug me.
The problem for me isn’t even that I see these errors and they pull me out of the book. The real problem is that I really want to fix them. That’s what I did for 30 years, after all, and that’s what my brain still wants to do. The better the book is, the more I want to fix its boo-boos. And to be fair, I want my own writing to be as accurate, consistent, and clean as possible, so I appreciate it when my friends and readers inform me of my own errors. And because my books are on Amazon as Kindle books and print-on-demand paperbacks, I can easily upload a corrected version when someone points out a problem. And I do. I want my books to be as good as they can be.
And I want the same for other authors. But I worry that it makes me something of a Grammar Harpy. I worry that people avoid my emails because of it. When my emails show up in their in-boxes do they exclaim, “Oh lord! I wonder what nit-picky thing Sharon wants to bug me about now?”
I suppose that, no matter what profession one chooses, we all become critical about the things we’ve gotten good at. I imagine professional chefs approach every meal with a more critical eye than does the typical diner, for example. Hairstylists likely look at everyone’s haircut differently than us non-stylists do, and plastic surgeons probably look at everyone’s nose as though it’s a blank canvas. When you know how the sausage is made, you look at all sausage differently (and, in the case of actual sausage, probably with a great deal of disdain).
I suppose I should be grateful that my chosen profession hasn’t ruined other aspects of my life that I’d rather enjoy with blissful ignorance. I wonder, for example, how gynecologists approach sex with their wives. Is it just like another day at the office? Come to think of it, I’m really glad I wasn’t intent on becoming a urologist. I’d hate to look at my husband’s parts with anything but excitement!
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