My Nerdiness Revealed: Editing

I am a nerd. There really is no question about it. I think the fact that my blog name is a Shakespeare quote is evidence enough. But I'm not a nerd in the LARPing, WOWing, Dungeons and Dragons sense, thank heavens. No, I'm rather particular about where my nerdiness focuses. So this series is about those things that I'm most passionate about, which is where my nerdiness is revealed.

My first passion is editing. I have always loved books and really good writing, but it wasn't until college that I realized just how much I love grammar and words. I especially enjoy the ability to look at a written work, see the things that need to be fixed, fix them, and help the author look good. It's extremely satisfying, and the thought of doing it for a living is extremely exciting.

I think the thing that makes me the most nerdy about editing is the fact that I absolutely love The Chicago Manual of Style (that's the big orange book in the picture). It is truly the editor's Bible and never leaves my side when I'm doing anything editing related. It's chock-full of rules and guidelines for things such as hyphenation (in fact, I'm itching to look up chock-full to see if it's hyphenated, two words, or one word, but I'll refrain), semi-colons, abbreviations, capitalization, etc. If there is any kind of doubt about how to write anything, there's something in Chicago that will help. It makes me happy.

You want to know just how much I love grammar? I have a favorite punctuation mark. Yes, it's true. You want to know what it is? An em-dash. I love the em-dash. It's so versatile, so fun, so full of voice and style. An em-dash is a dash the length of the letter m in whichever typeface you're using. It can be used parenthetically, to show an interruption, or to show an abrupt change of subject. You may wonder why this post is so lacking in them; it's because this program doesn't have the ability to make them. They would only show up as two hyphens, which is not correct. Geez, I'm sad.

There is a slight downside, though, and that is just that often people are afraid that they'll say something wrong around me. For example, recently I put together a book for my mom's Mother's Day present, and when my dad emailed me his portion of it, he said, "Don't be too harsh on me, Ms. Editor." And in fact, I didn't change a single thing. See? I can restrain myself. (Well, that and my dad is a really good writer so I didn't need to change anything anyway.) The flip side (hyphen, no hyphen? Must see Chicago . . . ) is that anytime I make a mistake in speech (which happens a lot), I get hammered for it, because I'm the English major/editing minor. But despite all that, there is honestly nothing else I would rather be doing. I feel so at home in my editing field that I know for sure it's the right place for me.

The hard part now is finding a job . . .