Deanna Hoak

Lucienne Diver has posted some excellent, commonsense blogging advice for those in the industry. You should all check it out.

And what she’s saying goes a long way toward explaining why I don’t have very many specific copyediting posts. My job entails fixing errors, and I won’t discuss specific projects unless I have an author’s permission, because it seems impolite to me to do so. As Lucienne notes, “You wouldn’t like your editor to blog all over the Internet about your inability to properly place your commas or the plot holes present in your first draft, patched only because of their eagle editorial eye.” While I’m sure it might be entertaining reading sometimes, there are limits to professional behavior. If you don’t follow those limits and decide to rant on about the terrible job some person has done, people are unlikely to want to work with you, even if they know they could do the job well.