CAROL FISHER SALLER is a senior manuscript editor in the Books Division of the University of Chicago Press and editor of The Chicago Manual of Style’s online Q&A. She is the author of The Subversive Copyeditor: Advice from Chicago (or, How to Negotiate Good Relationships with Your Writers, Your Colleagues, and Yourself) and, more recently, a young-adult novel, Eddie’s War.
TO A COPYEDITOR, MISTAKES ARE EVERYTHING. How many professions are devoted exclusively to finding and eliminating human error? It’s not only what copyeditors do; it’s all we do. We are correctors. Like maggots, we feed on the boogers and rot left behind by writers. Line by line, word by word, we poke and tweak and chew over their words, and if they’re lucky, we give them back something clean and…