This post was originally published on this site.
While grammar and punctuation are important, good editing involves a great deal more than fixing verb tenses and putting commas in the right place. Among the crucial questions an editor should be asking as she reads are:
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Is this fact correct?
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Is this action likely?
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Is this situation even possible?
And sometimes, The Snarky Editor is sad to say, the facts aren’t correct, the action isn’t likely, and the situation could simply not have happened.
… the last Grand Master of the Templar Order, Jacob de Molay…
Whenever we’re dealing with real people in history, it’s smart to ask Google. In this case, a three-second search would have told the author that the last grand master of the Knights of the Templar was Jacques de Molay, not Jacob.
She ordered fish and chips…. she, predictably, sliced her chicken sandwich in half.
Apparently the fish suffered a transformation on the way to the table, and it became a chicken.
The red brick building … no small feat for a creation of stone and glass.
Perhaps the author was simply trying not to repeat a word, but brick and stone are not the same thing.
I’m the break room with a tray of lemon brownies…
Brownies, by definition, contain chocolate. That’s what makes them brown (more brown, that is, than simply baking a batter could). Even the bars called “blonde brownies” include chocolate chips. But lemon flavoring combined with chocolate? That gives The Snarky Editor the shivers.
Just because brownies are baked in a cake pan and cut into squares doesn’t make the term “brownie” apply to everything that’s baked in a cake pan and cut into squares. What the author probably meant is the tray contains lemon bars.
… the snow-covered slopes gleamed blindingly white… Close to some small town in the Show Me State.
The Show-Me State is Missouri — which is not known for high mountain peaks covered with snow. The highest point in Missouri (and yes, it’s called a mountain) is in the Ozarks; Taum Sauk Mountain clocks in at 1,772 feet above sea level. Meanwhile, the highest mountain in North America, Denali in Alaska, soars to 20,310 feet. Quite a difference there.
“It’s an eight-hundred-year-old bridge … there isn’t another one like it in New England.”
There not only isn’t another bridge like this one, there isn’t this one. An eight-hundred-year-old bridge would have been built in 1226. That’s 550 years before the Declaration of Independence and almost 400 years before the Pilgrims landed. Native Americans may have built bridges, but they weren’t the constructed-of-stone-and-mortared-by-hand type that could stand up to 800 years of service.
The oldest surviving bridge in North America is the Frankford Avenue Bridge in Philadelphia, erected in 1697. Of the 10 oldest bridges in the country, most were built during the 1700s, generally after the Revolutionary War.
Because the story is written in British English, The Snarky Editor concludes that it was originally set in England, where a few bridges do date to the Middle Ages. When the author opted to move the setting to the New World, she changed things like city names and currency, but she missed a whole lot of car parks and solicitors. And unlikely old bridges.
The Snarky Editor comes out of hiding occasionally to comment on the awkward, silly, and sometimes hilarious editing errors found in published books.
#snarkyeditor #everybodyneedsaneditor
Leigh Michaels is the award-winning author of more than 100 books, including historical and contemporary romance, non-fiction books about writing, and local history. More than 35 million copies of her books are in print in 27 languages and more than 120 countries. She is also a writing coach and book editor, though she promises to be snarky only in regard to published books.
To find out more, check out https://leighmichaels.com
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