The adventure of publishing a book, page 3

Further to the above, I just want to grumble a bit about my first brush with the proofreaders.

One of them was concerned mainly with bringing my punctuation and formatting into line with house style, and there’s no problem with that. The most obvious change was moving Biblical references within the quotation marks, my most recent convention on ATS being to keep them outside.

This is not a religious publishing house, specifically, as given away by their offer of a standard copyright page including a paragraph beginning “This book is a work of fiction…”. Good job I spotted that before the satirists did. That’s an advantage, on the whole, because it means they don’t attempt any theological censorship. I can get away with treating the Bible in ways which would shock a conservative house. One downside is that they don’t spot any genuine Biblical mistakes either. The most serious example is that half my references to Absalom are spelled as Absolom, and someone has been assiduously correcting them the wrong way round.

The real annoyance is the way the other proofreader has been getting enthusiastic about improving my use of the English language. I’ve been gradually building up a picture of him from his unwanted corrections. For example, it’s clear that he’s not familiar with Biblical language. He wants to change “God’s people Israel” into “God’s people IN Israel”, “separate to the Lord” into “separate FROM the Lord”, and “In David’s bosom” into “ON David’s bosom”. He also wants to add commas to “John the Baptist”. For that matter, I’m not sure that he’s familiar with any kind of literature. He keeps finding fault with standard expressions, like “single-handed”, just because he’s never met them before. He doesn’t like the fact that I’m using “elite” and “ceremonial” as nouns.

As a substitute for wide reading, he has a rule-book. For example, one of the rules obviously lays down the law on “an” always proceeding a vowel, so he objects to “an historical God”. The rule-book doesn’t tell him, so I’m trying to teach him, that the usage is an aid to speech, so it depends on the way a word SOUNDS, not on the way it looks. The “h” in “historical” or “hotel” or “hereditary” is so nearly silent that a preceding “an” can be helpful in speech and therefore legitimate in writing. Part of the problem, I think, is that he doesn’t have an ear for the sound of written language. I can always hear everything I write (I’m told that my lips move when I’m drafting sentences in my mind).

There must be another section on the correct formation of the comparative. So he wants to change “David grew more feeble” into “David grew feebler”, which upsets the rhythm of the sentence (not enough syllables). On similar principles, he changed “more complete and systematic” into “completer and more systematic”, which was irritating, but I let it pass as comparatively harmless.

I HATE the expression “metaphor for” because of the duplication of sound, and I manged to avoid it during a year’s worth of threads on Revelation. Not easy. But this man does not like either “metaphor of” or “metaphor about” and wants to use “for” in both cases, which must be the enforcement of another rule.

My suspicion that such an obsessive rule-follower had to be a product of American high-school English was confirmed when he tried to change “Chronicles has got muddled” into “gotten”. Which gets the reader stumbling over a pair of two-syllable words, so it’s another symptom of cloth ears.

I’ve sent the manuscript back with reasoned explanations of my preference for the original word-choices. I’m sure we’ll be able to work it out.