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Copy cop
The University of Chicago's style chief lays it down.
Carol Fisher Saller settles a lot of arguments. When writers and editors clash over punctuation rules—say, when an editor insists on using the serial comma and an author insists on losing it—they turn to Saller for help.
For the last decade, Saller has answered the questions that pour into the online Q&A for The Chicago Manual of Style. As she handed down verdicts on knotty questions about words, Saller noticed how personal these seemingly arcane disputes could get. Some people sounded as if they were ready to strangle one another. “I really started noticing how stressed the writers of these questions were,” says Saller, a senior manuscript editor at the University of Chicago Press, “and how much they were tormented by their battles with authors over rules.”
Saller decided all of those frazzled wordsmiths needed help—and not just another book explaining style rules. The Chicago Manual of Style, dictionaries and countless other books are available for anyone who wants to figure out what the serial comma is and whether to use it. But people who punctuate, capitalize and hyphenate for a living seemed to need advice on how to approach one another.
“I wanted to subvert the idea that editors and writers have to be locked in battle rather than serving the reader,” she says.
The result is Saller’s new book, The Subversive Copy Editor: Advice from Chicago (or, How to Negotiate Good Relationships with Your Writers, Your Colleagues, and Yourself) (University of Chicago Press, $13). (By the way, if you’re wondering what exactly a serial comma is, there’s one right in the title of Saller’s book—that comma before “and.”)
While copy editors are Saller’s target audience, the book includes wisdom that applies to just about anyone: how to ask questions without making them sound like accusations, and how to prevent your in-box from becoming an unmanageable mountain of e-mails. The most subversive advice Saller offers may be the idea that style rules can be broken. Authors often have good reasons for making exceptions, she says, and whatever best communicates to the reader, wins.
Like any good copy editor, Saller is a perfectionist, but she has learned that errors happen from time to time. “It probably won’t be perfect if it’s a project of any length,” she says. “More to the point, what’s perfect?”
She says she now understands what some of her mentors meant years ago when they told her, “It’s just a book.” That attitude helps her get through disputes that might have driven her over the edge when she was younger.
“I have cried,” she says, “but nobody gets to me like that now.”
Saller, who grew up in Peoria, majored in Latin at the University of Illinois and Greek philosophy at Cambridge University. Steeped in knowledge about dead languages, she wasn’t sure what sort of work to pursue—until she heard about a job opening at TV Guide. The Subversive Copy Editor put her in the strange position of being copy edited. The process went smoothly, Saller says, admitting that the copy editor caught some mistakes she’d made during the writing. “I mess up all the time,” Saller says. “That’s how I know things.”
