No, Really, I Meant It About the Copyeditors

Pursuant to my recent post on copyeditors, below are some of the comments left by the copyeditor of my most recent manuscript (book due out in August). Even out of context they should give you an idea of how thorough a good copyeditor is, and why I mean it when I say a good copyeditor makes me look smarter than I are, as it were.

might be better to delete this, since the sentence indicates “lowland” and this seems confusing, since it’s visually bringing the reader to a creek bottom only to find treetops, so to speak. I suspect you may be referring to the bottomland (low-lying land along a watercourse, says Webster’s) around Cotter Creek but again, the wording seems confusing here when you try to envision it.

from Le Tourneau company of Peoria; see old ads at, e.g., http://www.classicmachinery.net/forum/viewtopic.php?f=21&t=198

: there is a hyphenated adjective but here the function is passive verb with adverb, hence no hyphen

I’d suggest something like “the World Court in The Hague,” since The Hague itself is a city of a half-million people. The World Court is technically the International Court of Justice, and the city also of course holds the International Criminal Court, but both of those names are long-winded, of course, so the shorthand World Court seems better. Could even just say that and drop “The Hague” altogether

And this represents only a page or two…