I copyedited for five years in the offices of an esteemed book publisher, and during that time I became an expert in the most trivial things. Minor details occupied my workdays, which I spent in a …
Definitely, which is also what the author of this article writes in this paragraph:
Do we really need copyediting? I don’t mean the basic clean-up that reverses typos, reinstates skipped words, and otherwise ensures that spelling and punctuation marks are as an author intends. Such copyediting makes an unintentionally “messy” manuscript easier to read, sure.
I think the point is that there's no clear line between obvious mistakes and the arbitrary preferences of 19th century Latin fetishists (or contemporary pedant authorities). She names things like the position of commas before or after quotation marks, which I find it really hard to care about. The other group of examples she uses are non-prestige dialects that may not have standardized spelling. Is it really wrong to write "dont" when writing AAVE, like the example she quotes? That is probably a decision that should be made by the author and not a random white person with some college education.
Definitely, which is also what the author of this article writes in this paragraph:
I think the point is that there's no clear line between obvious mistakes and the arbitrary preferences of 19th century Latin fetishists (or contemporary pedant authorities). She names things like the position of commas before or after quotation marks, which I find it really hard to care about. The other group of examples she uses are non-prestige dialects that may not have standardized spelling. Is it really wrong to write "dont" when writing AAVE, like the example she quotes? That is probably a decision that should be made by the author and not a random white person with some college education.