The insanity that is a (good) copy editor

I don't think people truly appreciate what a copy editor is or what they do.

We are graphic designers and anal-retentive grammar/punctuation/spelling fanatics rolled into one. Do you know what kind of headache that is for us? For the people who have to listen to us rant (we rarely rave)?

It's not just the Merriam-Webster Dictionary that we sit and read in our idle moments; we chuckle over the witticisms of Bremner's "Words on Words," and we mutter "yeah, that's right!" while reading Zinsser or Strunk and White.

But ...

We also take the Quark XPress and Adobe Photoshop manuals home to read over dinner, learning new tricks to make funky, cool, pretty pages. We "aha!" at a long-sought solution to a transparency problem, we sweat over getting just the right shade of mauve to represent wine on a page ("it's got too much red in it!").

Lines and boxes are measured, pictures are meticulously traced ... new colors are created, trashed and re-created ... words are looked up, sentences are tweaked and restructured ... entire ledes are rewritten and reporters are taken to task for not knowing the difference between its and it's; between sell and sale; between sight and site. We stress out over comma placement/misplacement, and we (and our photographers) freak out over poorly cropped or placed photos.

We are living, breathing oxymorons (just please don't emphasize the "morons" part ...). We're word nerds and art students crammed into single night shift-working, coffee-sucking, slightly insane bodies.

If a page reads poorly in the grammatical, spelling, punctuated sense, it's our fault.

If a page looks like crap, aesthetically speaking, it's our fault.

Simply put, if you don't like something about the look or read of your newspaper, you can blame a copy editor.

But we're a pretty sassy bunch, too.

If you criticize us (to our faces, especially), be prepared to put your money (or your dictionary) where your mouth is and show that you know what you're talking about -- the Lil' Miss Sassy in me contends that most people who complain about the spelling errors in a newspaper can't spell in the first place ... so a properly spelled word just looks wrong to them.

And that, my dear readers, concludes today's rant.