Dear Eli Broad’s Copy Editors
Posted: April 30th, 2012 | Author: Michael Goldstein | | 1 Comment »
Just got a mass email from philanthropist Eli Broad. He is publishing an autobiography called “Be Unreasonable.” I am in favor of the general thesis, and he’s made some interesting big bets on ed reform. So I look forward to it.
Some clicking around led me to an intro by Mike Bloomberg. It reads:
When I was first elected mayor of New York in 2001, I set out to transform the city’s broken and dysfunctional Board of Education and turn around a school system that had been failing for decades. It was a daunting challenge: the NYC school system has 1.1 million students, which would make it the 10th largest system in the United States, just behind Dallas.
Ahem. My guess is a copy editor edited that passage from its original, but messed it up. Who knows. In any case, it should read:
the NYC school system has 1.1 million students, largest in the nation — in fact so large that if the NY schools were their own city, it’d the 10th largest in the United States, just behind Dallas.
You’re welcome.
Oh, poor maligned copyeditors:
“Another downside of the job is that only your mistakes are apparent. The catches are basically invisible. No one will look at an edited article and think, I am certain that, once upon a time, there was a double quote where there should have been a single, and a wise person fixed the issue for my benefit.”
http://www.theawl.com/2010/07/what-its-really-like-to-be-a-copy-editor
(Feel free to send your kids my way if they need informational interviews about an underappreciated profession in a shrinking industry!)