One of the absolute highlights of my editing career was the opportunity to proofread a reprint of The Word for World is Forest by Ursula K. Le Guin, with a new introduction by Stephen Graham Jones. “It shouldn’t be too complicated,” the project manager told me. It had already been published dozens of times, so my role was to hunt for any tiny, egregious errors like typos or substitutions that had snuck in through file conversion. I was unlikely to find any true errors in the manuscript itself.
Easy, right? Wrong.
1. What to do when no style sheet has been provided
The first thing that jumped out at me was that no style sheet had been provided. The book itself was first published in the 1970s, which means the original copyeditor’s style sheet, if it ever existed, is likely a hard copy and has been lost to time or buried somewhere in Le Guin’s archives. Since the project manager was going to cold read the file after I’d finished, a style sheet would be helpful for both of us. So I made one from scratch, noting the commonly applied choices as I went along.
2. Trying out a new macro: CopyToListAlphaMenu
A few months ago, I asked Paul Beverley to tweak his CopyToList macro so that it would automatically sort the list alphabetically and immediately return the cursor to the manuscript. Since then, the macro has evolved into the most useful macro ever. With CopyToListAlphaMenu, paired with a gaming mouse with extra buttons, I click in the word or phrase I want to copy over, and a little menu pops up with headings I’ve defined per job. I enter the number for the heading it should go under, and the macro builds the style sheet for me. Here’s what that menu looked like for the Le Guin manuscript:
This macro became an absolute lifesaver, as I was soon to find out that Le Guin’s style is quirky as heck—and absolutely intentional.
3. Don’t skimp on the pre-edit checks
Before every editing job, and in addition to PerfectIt 6, I run a few analytical macros that can highlight problem areas or clear up some fiddly things for me. First, I run ProperNounAlyse to collate all the capitalized terms and show me if any have different spelling. In this case, it found that two character names had been misspelled. I was gobsmacked. This manuscript has been edited and re-edited by so many people over the years, and everyone missed it! I even checked in previously published versions of the book that I had on my shelf, and yep, there they were: typos that had clung on since 1972.
I also ran HyphenAlyse, which helps me to see if there’s been any inconsistent hyphenation. And this, plus the capped terms I saw in the previous list, made me refill my coffee and try not to hyperventilate.
4. Don’t skip the bonbon read
In The Chicago Guide for Copyediting Fiction, Amy J. Schneider talks about a bonbon read, where she reads through the entire text before editing it. As publishers often have fairly low rates, many editors skip this step because the more time you spend working on the book, the less you’re making hourly. However, in this case, the bonbon read saved me from hours of undoing edits that should never have been made. The bonbon read is a quick skim, not a deep read. You’re forcing yourself to ignore typos; you’re reading for a sense of the story, to see how the book is structured, and to get a feel for the writer’s style choices.
Anyone who’s read Earthsea knows that Le Guin has always been very focused on the importance of semantics, or the naming of things and what they mean to different people. In this book, she really leans into that by making careful choices about how things are spelled, hyphenated, or capitalized. But I read Earthsea when I was twelve and had forgotten, so at first, I thought she had fallen prey to the old sci-fi cliché of Capitalizing Things That Are Important. As I progressed with my bonbon read, I discovered that this story was told from multiple perspectives, and each perspective capitalized things differently, depending on what was important to them. The ecowarriors cap names of trees, while the industrial soldiers cap military terms and names of weapons. And this project just got a lot more complicated.
5. Assume the author knows what they’re doing
By the time the book comes to me as a proofreader, it’s been through so many drafts that we’ve probably lost count (unless we’re diligent about versioning up the file name, of course). This affects the scope of the edit: A proofreader is often less concerned with things like sentence structure for clarity or conciseness (that’s the copyeditor’s job) except where it might cause severe misunderstandings. Similarly, continuity errors have usually been whittled out by now, and indeed, in a book published (and studied!) this many times, I didn’t spot any.
A less experienced editor might have flagged where characters were getting the facts wrong about certain events, not realizing that they were deliberately unreliable narrators. For example, a dead character walking around and talking normally to the perspective character might have been flagged as a continuity error. Le Guin was, and is, one of the greatest science fiction writers of all time, and she knows her craft. For a character whose worldview places as much importance on dreams as on reality, the memory or imagined ghost of a character would feel as real to them as the trees. Stet.
6. AI cannot write like this.
On its face, the story is simple enough: An alien invasion, destruction of the local resources and enslavement of the native people, a revolt, liberation, and an invitation later to join the league of planets. We’ve seen it before. What makes this story unique is its focus on semantics, its use of language, the creation of an entirely new grammar of understanding our world, and Le Guin’s unique writing style. Generative AI, the mediocrity machine, aims for the middle: the most common ways of phrasing things. It’s glorified autocorrect.
Le Guin’s writing is the opposite of that: Every word, sentence, and comma is used completely intentionally. Nothing is wasted. The rhythms pound like drum beats echoing through the forest, and the atmosphere it generates churns in you until you’re crying over these fictional characters and wondering if you might be crying for our world a bit too.
Generative AI cannot achieve the multilayered, metatextual references, the subtext, the slow build of tension and emotion that makes this story sing. AI-written text rings hollow and smells like burnt rubber.
I still can’t believe how lucky I was to be asked to proofread this book. It melted my brain, reshaped it, and then shot it into space. I got to use new tools, I faced my fear of overly complicated caps and hyphens, and I gained some wisdom. Ursula K. Le Guin was a brilliant writer, and this was an absolute honor. I’m a better editor for it.
Can't see the forest for the trees?
Even editors need editors. This blog post was copyedited by NC Dia-Schneebeli Editorial Services.
