Inner space

(Remember when Meg Ryan was cute, instead of a bio-engineering experiment? Actually, this 1987 rendering already makes her look a little bio-engineerish, a portent of Restylane to come. But I digress.)

When your production-editor cap is on, you look for all kinds of spacing problems in your documents. For me, the easiest ones to see lie inside the text block: those random extra spaces between words or sentences.

I see these quickly, a facility a design director I knew once described as "scary." I just glance down, and, before I even look, there they are, like they're circled in fluorescent orange. Big as Ike.

No surprise, then, that I really hate to see these spaces make it through to a final piece. If they were something I struggled to see, I'd be a lot more forgiving, I'm sure.

Last year, I went to a fine-arts gallery at a well-known liberal-arts college. It was my first visit. The exhibitions were pretty interesting. I had heard from someone employed at the college that the curators were very proud of their sensibilities and very resistant to any creative input from elsewhere at the college, including the editorial staff in the communications office.

Therefore, I was surprised, but not surprised, to see the gallery's item labels weren't particularly well-written. Insularity can do that. And the extra spaces . . . oh, the humanity. So numerous, so painful. In big easy-to-read display type, no less.

I left thinking, well, that's a cute collection. Instead of thinking, what a fine collection; it does this college proud.

Professional accomplishment depends on getting detail after detail right, especially where language and editorial design are concerned. Leave unnecessary spaces you can drive a truck through on a bunch of item labels, and your attentiveness to responsibilities less easily "seen"—the thoroughness of your research, your historical analysis—is immediately called into question.

So, whenever possible, just miniaturize me and Dennis Quaid, slap us in a little miniature submarine thingie, and we'll swim through the "body" of your material and zap these inner spaces away. Singing "Twistin' the Night Away."

Or just look for and zap them yourself. ("Twistin' the Night Away" optional.)

Outer space

The next time you look at proof, scan your paragraph indents. At least one of them will have an extra space you'll have to delete.

No, really! Just look.

See? Never fails.

The flabby preposition

If you're an editor, one of your most important tasks is to cut through thickets of unnecessary verbiage, to find ways to ensure coherent concision.

I mean, you keep it short, stupid.

You'll be an effective editor of your own or other people's work if you focus on nothing more than this: Chop words. Tighten everything up. If it can be said in six words, don't let it stretch out to sixteen. Red-pencil away the fat.

Consider the preposition. Removing the ones that aren't absolutely necessary—and so many are not—is a quick, painless way to remove a pound or two. And, trust me, every ounce counts.

my favorite restaurant in Boston / my favorite Boston restaurant

handed the cape to Fritz / handed Fritz the cape

many of the jungles around the world / many of the world's jungles

the shingles on the house / the house's shingles

A huge percentage of your sentences will have one or more of these empty prepositions. Hunt them; weed them out. It's so crazy easy. And the ounces will add up.

Voila. Leaner, more defined prose. Without even breaking a sweat.

Comma chameleon

If commas were teenage girls, they'd be wearing too much eye makeup, listening obsessively to Bon Iver, and writing sad poetry. Certain that no one—no, not a single human being on earth—likes or understands them.

But guess what? They actually do have reasons to slam the bedroom door and mope. They are frequently treated unfairly. Forgotten. Dropped like a red-hot potato.

Just look at salutations ("Hello") and imperatives ("Go"). Commas should be right there with them. But, so often, commas are ignored, left home alone.

(Come to think of it, Salutations and Imperatives would be a good name for an indie band, one a comma would surely want to sing along with. And so Latinate! So "Salve, imperator.")

Anyway, salutations. Anytime you say "Good morning," or "Bye," or "Howdy" to people you call by name, you need to separate the salutation and the name with a comma. For instance: "Hey, Proof Cabinet! How goes it?"

Yet just count how many emails you get today that say "Hi Jack," or "Yo Adrian," or "See you tonight bro," or whatever the greeting/goodbye might be. You will undoubtedly get more salutations that are comma-challenged than comma-appropriate.

Then there are imperatives—suggestions or commands. They provide some wickedly great opportunities for comma-free mayhem. Take a look:

Let's eat, Aunt Betty!
Let's eat Aunt Betty!

These two suggestions point to very different outcomes, don't they? If you want to grab a quick bite and your intended dinner companion is Aunt Betty, stick that comma in as shown.

If you are encouraging others to nosh on your poor aunt, then, by all means, leave the comma out.

Commas affect meaning, big time. Make sure the comma is right where it ought to be, separating the imperative from the person or group you're addressing: "Dream big, baby," "Take five, people," "Look at that, honey." Otherwise, you may be communicating something very different.

Admit it: Commas are cool. One day, you'll be sorry you aren't their friend.

Reversible

I've had some bad bosses, my friends. I've also had a lot of good bosses, but the bad ones are so much more fun to talk about (I believe Leo Tolstoy said something along that line).

One bad boss wasn't my boss for very long. She had a massive crush on some guy in the office, and, when that didn't work out well, she moved across the country to a city where an ex-boyfriend just happened to live.

During the months she supervised me and my confreres, she wasn't a BAD bad boss—no red-faced screaming fits, no head-scratching displays of incompetence. She was just kind of a silly and not terribly involved presence around the cubicles.

And yet she said something exactly right to me, at exactly the right time. I was working on a big book, and the release-to-printer deadline was at hand. "You must be glad to see this one go," she said in an offhand way to me.

I allowed as how I was not.

She expressed surprise. I admitted I was worried I hadn't found every error. I might be releasing a book with errors! I didn't want to let it out of my hands, not yet. If only I could look at it a little bit more. There could be problems I hadn't seen!

"If there are mistakes," she said calmly, "we will fix them."

More than twenty-five years later, I can recall the sense of relief that washed over me.

Here's what I heard: Everyone makes mistakes. They are not the end of the world, even when they're in print (and hardbound). We still have another round of proof, another chance for you to weed out boo-boos. Failing that, errata sheets can be employed. Then there's always the next edition. Mistakes are not the end of the world.

Even I, the most anxious and desperate-to-touch-perfection young professional in a hundred-mile radius, resonated to the wisdom in what she said. I think about it still.

It's just a great mantra for anal, obsessive editors, and the people who supervise them: Work hard, then relax; if there are mistakes, we will fix them. (Feckless, la-di-dah editors, plug your ears. We'll come up with another mantra for you.)

Thank you, bad boss. You may have been my best boss.

I me mine

You're at an office meeting—perhaps you work at a university—and everyone around the table is full of grand ideas and eager to share them. At length, with numerous examples.

Or you're watching a couple of pundits on TV confidently debate the prospects of this candidate or that proposal.

The vibe is cerebral, self-possessed, a little poindextery.

Then someone says, "That's exactly the way it looked to she and I."

Immediately, the "wah wahhhh" sad trombone sounds (at least, it does in your head), and you start applying a little more cynical scrutiny to everything that person says.

How do so many people—smart, highly educated people—get this pronoun case wrong, in writing and in speech? It seems they convince themselves the subjective case must be right here, because it sounds more elegant, more in tune with elevated discourse.

Even though you would never, ever say, "That's exactly the way it looked to we."

I have Mr. Moore, my high-school Latin teacher, to thank for my rarely falling into this bear trap of English grammar. Once you learn the accusative case, you are unlikely to stick an "I," "she," or "he" where a lowbrow "me," "her," or "him" is called for.

Uncrook the pinky, people. Sometimes, the plain-sounding objective pronoun is actually the refined choice.

Paper chase(r)

When I copyedit—especially at a level that involves some significant text changes—what I do is I . . . I . . . Maybe I shouldn't say.

It's kind of a shameful thing to admit. I've never really talked about it with other editors. One I told once looked at me blankly. So I've always assumed this is just my little oddity, something no one else needs to do. I'm slow-witted, clearly. I should keep my obvious competence lacunae to myself.

But it really helps me. I can't be the only one, right?

Okay [deep breath]. I edit the electronic file, until it looks good to me on my display screen.

Then I print it out (!) and read the printed pages (!!). And I see a million, bazillion errors and infelicities I still need to fix.

This always happens. I require a printed-page read to get my edit a lot closer to fine/rigorous/tight.

I have no idea why this is so. Does each medium light up different language-function cells, in different parts of the brain?

All I know is this: The printed-page chaser never fails to yield stuff I need to fix. I've tested this approach many times over a lot of years. I can only conclude that I see in a different way when I look at words on paper than when I read from a computer screen.

I have enough mileage as an editor to remember the time when it was ALL paper. I wouldn't go back to those days for love or money. Working with electronic files lets you really dig deep, and buff to a high-gloss finish.

But firing up the inkjet for the last round (or two) of edits is essential quality control (for me).

Hello, my name is Proof Cabinet, and I need paper.