Part 2 Of The Editing Tutorial Series. Formatting, Formatting, Formatting
Part 2 of my Editing Tutorial Series. Believe me, there's a tedious pleasure to formatting. Ensuring that your text is consistent throughout and emphasis is all in the right place. So satisfying.
As I’ve mentioned before, and in part 1 of this Editing Tutorial Series, various publishers have their own house styles. Adapting a manuscript to align with that house style can take quite a while. Each house style will come with its own formatting intricacies, each of which has to be applied.
Take a quick glimpse into the books on your shelf and you can spot those house styles. It’s typically easier with fiction as non-fiction accounts for incorporating various sources, including contributing individuals and publications. With an oral history, in particular, you have to ensure that those various sources are used properly, formatted correctly, and, ultimately, given respect.
Emphasis
Having worked on the manuscript as a Google Doc throughout, I’ve been trying to imbue my own emphasis. The names of contributors have been highlighted in bold and exclamation marks have been used as verbatim from written responses. However, from reading similar books (Manchester Unspun How a city got high on music by Andy Spinoza and Totally Wired: The Rise and Fall of the Music Press by Paul Gorman), it’s likely I’ve been getting this wrong. In both books, quotes are incorporated into the text, which I tend to find difficult to read. Another book I’m reading currently, Reach For The Stars by Michael Cragg, emboldens the name of each individual who’s quoted and leaves each quote as its own paragraph. You do get the sense that each contributor is in a room taking turns to speak.
Notice how the names of those books are in italics? Such emphasis tends to be used for titles. You can include;
music releases, so albums and singles,
books, and,
TV and radio shows.
This was a bit of a task considering how often I’d referenced various singles and albums (namely Is This It by The Strokes and Whatever People Say I Am, That’s What I’m Not by Arctic Monkeys). Thankfully, ctrl and F can make that task a lot easier. Indeed, when editing each individual part (there are now four that make up the manuscript), I’d select all and remove any italics or bold to make sure I knew that the emphasised terms I added were the only ones that existed.
Capitalisation
This is one rule that may be quite specific to a publishing house. I tended to believe that headings should be capitalised, but this looks to be another formatting aspect I may need to change. Yup, with every. single. title. Some books will use minimal capitalisation so only the opening words is capitalised with certain terms excepted.
For instance, I made sure that terms like ‘New Yorkshire Wave’, ‘COVID-19’, and band names remained capitalised. The end result with chapter titles looks a little odd and lacks a certain impact, almost as if written by a child, but once it’s consistent it kinda makes sense. That’s especially the case when the chapter names are listed in the contents section.
Quotations
Ah, quotations. Considering there are so many in an oral history, this is one aspect of formatting that needed a lot of time. There are several tiny rules to remember, so strap in;
Add anything to the quote, such as indicating what the ‘it’ is referring to, and you should use square parentheses [ ], not ( ),
Use single quotation marks, unless the contributor is quoting someone else.
Spoken language will differ slightly from written language so saying was when referring to a pluarity, instead of were, may necessitate using ‘sic’. (The term ‘sic’ comes from latin meaning thus. I prefer using it only in obvious cases as it can seem mean to correct someone’s speech.)
Then there’s the length of the quote to consider, and there may be a bit of wiggle room. Quotes less than 50 words should be extracted onto separate lines and appear as their own paragraph. Depending on the font size, these extended quotes may, or may not, consist of five or more lines. I tended to stick to six lines just to make that task a bit easier.
What you do result in is several shorter quotes lined up alongside each other, as if each individual were in the same room having a discussion. Again, I used ctrl and F to highlight all the double quotation marks, replaced them with single ones, and manually edited the quotations within quotations.
Thankfully, this is the first manuscipt I’ve handed in, so any further issues are likely to be highlighted back to me. Let’s pray there aren’t that many.