I’ve been busy writing a sermon for church (or a sermon-lite, as I like to think of it), so there will be fewer posts on the DOG this week. One easy topic to write about though, since it’s a natural segue, is the ten commandments... for copyeditors. You didn’t know those came down from Mt. Sinai too, did you? Not quite Charlton Heston style, but close. Instead of ten, copyeditors have four commandments. It turns out the stone tablet engravers came out with these new minimums after the original ten. I think they unionized. Apparently, things now get costly after four.

So these “commandments” are probably more akin to the Hippocratic oath that doctors take on upon graduating medical school. Our buddy Wikipedia defines the Hippocratic Oath as an oath of ethics historically taken by physicians that derives from one of the most widely known of Greek medical texts. Back in the day, it had to do with swearing by healing gods like Apollo and others. The Latin phrase Primum non nocere or, “first, do no harm” became equated with the Hippocratic oath, but it is not in fact a part of it. Who knew? I think it’s just simpler to wrap your brain around the oath in that way. Today, it sounds a bit different. If you want to do a quick compare on the ancient and modern texts, click here to see.

Without further ado, the copyeditor’s oath of ethics, or four commandments, go like so according to Amy Einsohn’s Copyeditor’s Handbook (University of California Press, 2019):

1. Thou shalt not lose or damage part of a manuscript

2. Thou shalt not introduce an error into a text that is correct. (As in other areas of life, in copyediting, an act of a commission is worse than the act of omission.)

3. Thou shalt not inadvertently change the author’s meaning.

4. Thou shalt not miss a critical deadline.

Numbers one, two and four are pretty self-explanatory—not that they are any less important—but I think number three is where copyeditors and authors alike need to pay extra-careful attention.

The pitfalls around number three, in my opinion, are missing the author’s intent in the first place, or, ASSuming you know the author’s intent. (And yes, ASS is capitalized for a reason. You know what happens when you assume…) When you assume, you choose not to clarify with the author, and you forge ahead with your own preconceived notion of what “should” be regardless of what is.

Here’s a simple example: “Rembrandt’s portrait hung in Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum gallery.” It’s easy to brush by this sentence. I mean, it’s not exactly confusing. Well, actually it is. Is it a portrait of Rembrandt—his face—or, is it a portrait he painted of someone else’s face? If you just assume Rembrandt’s face is hanging in the gallery, you may very well be wrong. And you may miss something important that follows in the text. Your job, dear copyeditor, is to make sure the author is crystal clear and the reader is not confused.

This may be sacrilegious, but I’d add a fifth commandment to the list. (I’ll pay for it out of my own pocket, don’t worry.) The fifth would be not to make changes based on your own favorite word usage. Amy Einsohn provides an excellent example of this in her aforementioned book.

It is super tempting to make changes based on your own weird preferences and not even think twice about it. That’s why it’s necessary for copyeditors to really rein it in. Is it a necessary and substantive change that moves the text forward as a whole? If not, Leave. It. Alone. Don’t be an ass.

So maybe Moses didn’t actually receive these four commandments on stone tablets on Mt. Sinai, but hey, it kind of worked right?

The closing message is two-fold:

1. Copyeditors (myself included): Be careful. Abide by the law. Don’t be an ass.

2. Writers/authors: It’s your work. Be engaged. Don’t accept changes blindly. Make sure your meaning and intent are intact. And question your copyeditor if you feel things are changed flippantly. Got it? Open communication is KEY in this author-editor working relationship. It takes two to boogie. And boogie well.

Deal? Deal.