Come Together: A rant on editing

[Q]

I'm annoyed.

I just spent several bucks on an e-edition of a relatively new indie RPG, and while, conceptually, I give it an A+, technically, I'd have to give it an A-, or B+. I bought the e-book as part of a deal the author's company has, where you can buy the ebook, then upgrade to a print book, if you want it, for the difference in cost between the print and pdf. Sweet! I started reading and figured I'd be quickly sending along that difference for a nice shelf copy of what was shaping up to be an excellent piece of work. However, by the time I finished reading, I'd decided, maybe the price I paid for the ebook was a bit too much.

What's the problem? About a dozen or so editing misses: bad grammar, dropped words, extra words, misspelled words, typos, etc. The sort of things that make a reader stumble, breaking the flow and hindering comprehension, if only for a moment. And this book boasts an editor, who, according to the author, made significantly heavy edits. I've seen this unprofessional trend in nearly all of the indie texts I've purchased recently as reference and a window into the field. Mind you, these have been games from the stars of the gaming design community^†. They are all reasonably well-written, when allowing for style variance; they are all clever; they all have one or more unique aspects that make them cutting edge games. This is what we have come to expect from the community.

Are we also now to expect shoddy copy editing as well? Is it just me? Am I being too picky to expect professionals to supply professional-quality work? Maybe. Maybe I'm just grumpy today.
Many would say that the value of these works lies in the spirit of their content, not the letter. For the most part I agree. But frankly, as a fledgling game designer, I find it embarrassing to find so many mistakes that could have been avoided by careful reading. (I'm not talking about a single mistake in a whole text. Nobody is perfect; no one is going to be able to catch everything. That's why the big shots have editing teams. Fresh eyes find fresh mistakes.)

Here's my take:
Point one: it's one thing for the first printing of a large print-lot book to exhibit these editing misses. It's lamentable, but excusable. I've even encountered it with $90 textbooks. At least with textbooks, w'ere usually talking about several hundred pages of text. A dozen mistakes there is somewhat understandable. Usually these issues get corrected by the second printing. However, with indie game design, we're usually talking books on the order of 50 pages, maybe 100.
Point two: With the introduction of e-books and POD services, there really is no such thing as first printing, second printing, etc. It's all continuous. There is no reason for an author not to fix the little mistakes as they are found, simply "printing" a new pdf and providing it at the store. It's not only lamentable, but inexcusable.

So why do I find such mistakes so often? Either, a) the authors' don't care , or b) no one is telling them. I suspect the latter. After all, who wants to be the one to contact the author whose game you found utterly enthralling, but oh, by the way, you messed up here, here, and here. That's even more embarrassing than just finding the mistakes. Clearly, we have a Catch-22.

Oh, and I'm not just talking to hear myself speak, today. I have a solution to propose. Let's come together as a community and help each other out. We can't afford big editing teams for works that are only going to sell at a trickle for low prices. Yet, I wouldn't want my product going out with amateurish quality. I take pride in my work, as do all of you. I want it presented in the best light, given the best credibility. So let's form a mutual final-edit community. I don't propose that we do away altogether with professional editors. They are sorely needed (I imagine one could work wonders with this post). They can offer insight on how to tighten up prose to make it read easily, when to trash whole sections and start over, and when you're beating that horse. We need the pros; I fully intend to utilize them, and suggest you do too. What I'm talking about here is editing after the pros have done. After you get your baby all dressed up and ready to meet the world, take a minute to hand her to a stranger and see what they notice. Pass it along to fresh eyes. Give a copy to a friend who hasn't yet read the text (familiarity with the game is okay, as long as the text is new to him).

To that end, I propose we form a small community of final-read editors; volunteers who are willing to give a careful read to a piece before it hits the virtual shelves. Or even after, as long as the author intends to implement any necessary changes. So here's a start: contact me at quentin.hudspeth@gmail.com if you want me to help you out. Anyone else who wants to help out, post your contact info here. Let's all try to make each other look good!^‡

Slaintè,
Q


^†Note: I'm withholding game names purposefully. I don't want to point fingers here.
^‡I'll be posting this rant in other places, like <A href="http://qhudspeth.livejournal.com/" target=_blank>my livejournal</A>, and <A href="http://www.story-games.com/forums/" target=_blank>Story Games</A>, too, to get a wider dissemination than my little blog.

[Clinton R. Nixon]

Am I being too picky to expect professionals to supply professional-quality work?

You're not expecting professionals to do anything. You're expecting amateurs to supply professional-quality work.

[Ron Edwards]

Hiya,

Q, you probably know I'm the content moderator, and I am posting to say that this thread will be far more useful and meaningful if you do, in fact, name the game you are talking about.

This isn't about feelings and blame. It's about quality of presentation, which is part of publishing. One might choose, as a self-publisher, to put aside these concerns, and that will have consequences. If that's the case, and the publisher really has screwed the pooch on this one, then your post will help the publisher in question to see that those consequences are real. We can also talk about initial errors in printing and editing, and how they get minimized or fixed.

On the other hand, you might be a crank. Maybe your favorite word got misspelled, or maybe you hate all typos, forever, and any one of them will ruin a book for you. If that's the case, then we can understand that discussing the topic with you is pointless.

So it all comes down to this: as the members of this discussion, we need to know what we're supposed to be talking about. We can't have any sort of reasonable points be made or understood if we all have to guess, or if we each have a different degree and type of error in each person's mind as we try.

Please specify the game in question, and if the author has a problem with that, he or she can take it up with me, and you don't have to sweat it.

Best, Ron

[Justin D. Jacobson]

Really, you have two separate posts.

There's the rant half. Listen to Ron. The rant isn't constructive unless it's specific because I can think of a number of counterexamples to your generalization. You have not read Burning Empires. I know this because you could not possibly type what you did if you had. I just released Helios Rising, and I think we've caught one typo out of 540 pages. So, for me at least, it's falling on deaf ears.

Then, there's the final-edit-pool half. I think it's a great idea. However, you'd have gotten a lot more traction if you split it from the rant half, and you'll have a lot more success with it if you get specific other than simply providing an e-mail. Organize something. One issue you may encounter is that many designers (myself included) just don't have to the time to do an edit on a number of other projects. If you're just talking about a read-through to see if the fresh eyes happen to catch a typo, specify that.

[Q]

On the other hand, you might be a crank. Maybe your favorite word got misspelled, or maybe you hate all typos, forever, and any one of them will ruin a book for you. If that's the case, then we can understand that discussing the topic with you is pointless.

<Sigh> Actually, Ron, it probably does fall more into that category than anything. I'm probably being too sensitive, and that kind of stuff definitely depends on the time of day, amount of food recently, etc. for me. I even let this sit for a few days to stew. Still, in hind sight, I think I didn't present my thoughts well, and came off as too judgemental. I know there must be reams of work out there that comes off flawlessly (thanks for the examples, Justin) which may be why the few (and I stress few) mistakes I did find were so obvious. I confess to having only a small gaming library.
Maybe I'm just too much of a perfectionist and this stuff just doesn't matter much to anyone else. Mainly I hoped to provide a way to even the playing field, bringing all indie works to the same level of polish. And that just didn't come across in the post. My apologies for generalizing and just plain blithering.

Justin, I'll take your advice and split this up. Let me find some examples and also try to clarify my thoughts here. Could take a while to find examples, though.

Clinton, the moment you put your work up for sale and people start paying for it, you become a professional. Even professionals can be novices, though, and that is the real issue I forgot to cover. (I like your work, btw.)

Thanks for the comments,
Q

[PatSully98]

Hey Q, I think your final-edit-pool is a great idea! I'd absolutely be willing to copyedit anybody's work, free of charge of course. patsully98@hotmail.edu is the place ;)

[PatSully98]

Aw hell. I meant patsully98@hotmail.com. Doesn't bode well for me as a copy editor, but at least I caught it, and I assure you I'm smarter than I look. I promise! :)

[Moreno R.]

Maybe all that it's needed it's some incentive for people to write to the author a list of the mistake they fount in the first printing (or the first try pdf), to correct them in the next printings.  (for example, the author could promise to the people who do so to send them a corrected pdf PLUS writing their name on the "thanks" column in the credits page in all the following printings)

[Rich Forest]

Q,

This is publishing. If you're identifying a real trend, we should talk about it as openly as we can, as Ron said. I know you may prefer not to do that now, in retrospect, and that's fine. But I would like to make a couple points that (I hope) are of general value to designers when making reasoned judgments about editing and proofreading.

The writing, editing, re-writing, proofreading process (which will generally have more steps than what I've just listed) is complex, and errors and "bad verbal hygiene" (I'll come back to this) can make it into the final product for a number of reasons. Each reader brings a set of expectations to a text, and each set of expectations is unique. When producing a written text for publication, you can be guaranteed that some reader will have difficulty with something in your text. We try to minimize this to the best of our abilities, but it will almost certainly happen.

Let's take a minimal production that involves a single editor. (This is based on my own experience, of course.) You write a game; you pay an editor to look it over. It gets an editing run, after which you revise. It then gets proofread by the same editor before publication. Hopefully, it has gone through layout before the final proofreading run. After the final proofreading run, you go to press.

It's printed. You have it in hand. People start buying it, and they start pointing out errors in it. Why are they finding these errors?

You've offered two suggestions: a) the authors don't care and b) no one is telling them. I think you are underestimating the complexity of the process. I'd like to offer some additional suggestions as to why errors might remain in the text. 

c) One editor is not enough.

This is guaranteed. One editor will not catch every error in the text. This will be true even if the editor is excellent. This will be true even if the editor has gone through three editing runs: editing, proofreading, and final proofreading, for example. I've served as sole editor for a few games, so I'll use myself as an example. First, my personality tends toward the obsessive anyway, and I edit obsessively. I print the manuscript and add editing marks, questions, and suggestions in pen. These are color coded to indicate what type of comment I'm making. I am slow, and this is compounded because I will need to mail you the pages when they're done. I also insist that at minimum I am given time to do another proofreading (and, if necessary, editing) run before publication. However, when I pick up the published version of a book that I've edited, I expect to find errors that I missed during production. This is painful, but I have more or less made peace with its inevitability. (Of course, I still try to make sure with each new book that it doesn't happen again.)

In contrast, textbooks are edited and proofread by teams, in multiple stages. Here's an example: I acted as a proofreader for an academic book. It was aimed at an audience of graduate students and fellow researchers (not the sort of textbook you're talking about, admittedly). So it was not one of the big moneymakers for the publisher. Nonetheless, even after I came in at a late stage, I proofread the manuscript twice. Each of the authors proofread the manuscript twice. In between each of my proofreading runs (and those of the authors), the copy editor and proofreaders at the publishing house did their work. This is a very slow process. It takes years to publish a book like this. I would not be surprised if academic textbooks see an even more thorough editing process, as they are much more likely to be much more profitable for the publishers than the kind of book I worked on. The length of the manuscript is not the only thing that makes them a very poor comparison to independent publishing.

d) Each time the manuscript changes hands, exciting new errors can be introduced.

These errors may be introduced by the author during revision. They may be introduced in layout. They may be introduced by the editor (yes, the editor). They may be introduced by the software you use to draft and revise, if this software makes automated "corrections" to texts. They may be introduced because the editor and author have misunderstood each other on a suggestion. If you have multiple proofreaders, any one of them could introduce an error or set off a chain of changes by the author that introduces an error.

This will be very important for you to be aware of in managing your project, Q.

e) The errors may not be errors.

If the book was produced by an author or an editor with an attitude, they may have made reasoned choices about wording or punctuation that conflict with the advice in books of "verbal hygiene." Again, I'll use myself as an example. It's the author's text. Their name is on the cover. They decide what is in the final manuscript. I will flag everything and make suggestions. Sometimes these suggestions are in direct opposition to a particular "punctuation rule" or "grammar rule." This is because many pieces of advice on grammar, punctuation, and word usage are inherited from books like Strunk & White: high prestige books of verbal hygiene that make many empirically false claims about language structure. Although often false, these books have high prestige, and we can't afford to simply ignore their advice. (Personally, I prefer to ignore much of their advice with extreme prejudice. Which I admit isn't technically ignoring it at all.)

So if I'm editing your manuscript, you might find a note like, "The prescriptivist rule here would be to avoid passive voice, but I think the passive voice works well here." (There are information focus reasons that English has a passive voice. And in spite of Orwell's overrated essay, these reasons are not in fact all pure evil.) The author knows the rule and also knows my suggestion. This is a stylistic issue. My feelings are not hurt if the author prefers the prescriptivist stylistic advice, but I want the author to know there is a stylistic choice.

Here's another example, this time of a very common, but empirically false, claim: the proscription against using they/them as a generic third person singular pronoun. That's empirically false as a statement about the structure of the English language, but it is very popular verbal hygiene, and it is tied up in false appeals to tradition that are themselves in direct opposition to both modern and historical usage. I lay this issue out in some detail for the author and let them decide. Anyone who's been paying pedantic attention to this post has probably noticed my own preference.

Those are just a few additional possibilities. I'm sure other editors could help me out with more ways that errors (and non-errors) make it through to the final product. My overall point is that even a fairly minimal editing process is complex, and errors may appear in the final product in spite of best efforts to the contrary. (And some "errors" might occur because of best efforts to be contrary.)

Rich

[Q]

...but not the sentiment. I'll try to explain in separate posts; let me first say a few things.

• I feel like an ass for ranting like that. It was not the way to present a serious topic that I care about. The whole point wasn't me getting annoyed with one book, but that I see a bit of a spread in the polish of professional IRPGs. I wanted to present a way to deal with it before the spread grows, and in the process pick the experts brains about the final-edits process. I'm sorry for sidetracking with that rant as way of introduction. Please forgive my foolishness.
• Thank you so much Rich for taking the time to post. You really cleared up a lot of unasked questions and made points I should have seen myself.
• I should have used the term "proofreading" rather than editing. It is a more focused term and covers the actual aspect of publishing I'm describing. I did not intend to imply that one style of writing was better than another. I'm a big fan of varied styles and fight hard against Strunk-and-White-ruled writing (thought, it is one of my favorite guides). I was focusing on the little silly mistakes that slip through the cracks but still mar the surface.
• Rather than attempt to discuss the book and author that prompted the post, I will take my own advice and contact him personally with the information. As I mentioned above, the point of the post wasn't to complain about a particular work, but rather to address the general issue. This does not require a list of substandard books, as that would just start off a side-thread on people's thresholds.
• A correction: I fell prey to my own problem. In the original post I said there were "about a dozen or so" mistakes. That should have been "about a half dozen or so". I missed that in my proofread. That works out to about one per ten pages for the book in question, so, yes, I realize I was being too harsh and grumpy. Thanks for setting me straight. I know there are those who will say even that was too much, and those who couldn't care less if every page had some minor mistake on it, as long as the game is good. My hope is that there is a middle ground.

[Q]

Recently it has occurred to me that there exists a gradient in the amount of polish one can expect from the text of independently produced RPGs. I refer here only to the "professional" works, which I'll define to be those that are paid for, rather than freely disseminated (this is not, of course, the only connotation of professional, but for lack of a better term...). Some publishers take great pains to ensure quality both conceptually and technically in their work. Others stress concept and let technicality take a backseat. I have not found any that stress technical polish over conceptual, however, so that's good.

Now, I don't say this gradient is an evil thing that needs to be stamped out, but rather a blemish on the art form that I see needs addressing. With my earlier rant, I gave the impression that there was only gold or pyrite, and for that I am sorry. Rather, what I meant to convey was that there is an opportunity for us to shine (if I may humbly include myself in the profession, though I am technically still amateur and unpublished). A few errors will always crop up, for the various reasons mentioned in Rich's post, and likely more. I don't expect all works to be perfect, but if we can raise the quality of the average, then let's do.

We hold the big publishing companies (be they RPG, or mainstream literature) to a high standard when it comes to the technical polish, whether it be because of the amount of money we shell out or whatever, and we bitch and moan to them when they let us down, or simply put out the word that their product is crap (and let's face it, it happens to them, too). Consequently, as Rich pointed out, the editing process for the big guns is intense. Frankly, we can't expect the indie community to follow the same procedures, because it's not fiscally responsible. Yet, to lower our standards should be distasteful, at the least.

Hence, I wanted to present an idea for mitigating this perceived range in quality. I agree with Rich that one editor is not enough for very thorough proofreading, which is why I suggested the volunteers group for that final read. In addition, it would be great if the community engendered a sense of openness about post-production edits, encouraging readers to submit any mistakes or simple misunderstandings to the author, whether through email or forum postings. (Perhaps this is already the case; I haven't taken the time to see if anyone is posting that sort of stuff here.) The Forge might even consider creating such a forum where authors could check to see if their work is mentioned...or not if they consider it a non-issue. This would certainly make the reprint process go more smoothly for those publishers who do so.

The indie RPG development community is like a guild, and as such we have a responsibility to encourage (though, not require) a high standard among the guild members. So, I guess what I'm saying is the best way to do that is to help each other out. Many people already go out of their way to playtest new games, so I'm sure there'll be others who'd be happy to help with the proofreads. If ten people have new games ready to hit the market, and they all swap off even once, they have already made inroads to the complex level of editing Rich described.

Thank you again for your time,
Q

[Ron Edwards]

Here's what I suggest: develop a webpage which organizes proofreading services. I'm not sure how, but that's because too many possible models occur to me, not too few. Folks who want to help along these lines, or folks who need the services, can find one another. The best advertisement for a given person, of course, would be the work he or she has helped to improve.

I suggest also communicating privately with two active Forge contributors, one of whom has already spoken up, Rich Forest. The other one is Thor Olavsrud. Both of them are extremely well-regarded for the work they've done to improve manuscripts for independent publishers, and they might be able to provide good ideas for what such a website might look like, and how it might function.

Best, Ron

[Q]

Hi All,

For those interested, I've put together a rudimentary website for the Indie RPG Proof-reading Community --> http://home.nycap.rr.com/thehudspeths/indie_rpg_proofing.htm

Please check it out and send me your comments and suggestions.