Can good editors ever make mistakes? Our whole job is to spot and correct errors. So, if someone spots a mistake we’ve made, does that mean we’re not good editors?

Perhaps you’re reading this not as an editor but as a writer. If you, as a writer, are trying to find a good editor, does spotting a typo in an editor’s writing always mean that the editor is bad at their job?

Perhaps, but also perhaps not. We’re all human, after all. Everyone makes silly typos sometimes, even skilled editors. Yet you still need some way to make sure that an editor is going to do a good job. If snap judgments are prone to error, is there a better method authors can use to tell if an editor has the skills they claim to have?

To explore these questions, I’m first going to talk about the inside experience of editing. Then, at the end, I’ll give authors some advice on how they can tell whether an editor is skilled and right for the job at hand.

Some Observations on the Editing Community

I’ve been attending editing courses, webinars, and conferences for a while now. There are a couple of themes I’ve noticed about this community of professionals.

Genuine Passion for Language, Communication & Stories

First, we all tend to be some flavour of passionate nerd. We’re deeply passionate about the craft of language, communication, storytelling, or all of the above and more. Some of us enjoy the rules more, and some enjoy the artistry more.

Some can be pedantic and too rigid about what’s “correct” and “incorrect.” But the culture of the community on the whole puts the focus on strong communication first, correctness second. That means understanding the rules and usually following them. However, sometimes that also means bending the rules and letting clear self-expression trump convention. (And that’s all grammar rules are, by the way: conventions, not immutable law.)

The Blessing of Perfectionism: Quality Work

Second, we also all tend to be perfectionists. “High attention to detail” is often the first skill we list on our resumes. Any trait tends to work like a coin with two faces: one a strength, one a weakness. Perfectionism is no different. We want to make things right. Clear. Correct. Beautiful. And perfectly so.

It is also impossible to be perfect. Yet, in striving toward perfection, we can still create great things, things that are better for the striving, even if the envisioned destination is technically unreachable.

So, perfectionism can be a valuable skill, but it can also be a curse. If perfectionists always strive toward the impossible, it’s easy to miss that good is still good, an achievement is still an achievement, even if it’s not perfect.

The Curse of Perfectionism: Imposter Syndrome

Third, there’s a big theme in our community that many of us struggle with imposter syndrome: the anxious idea that our experience is not valid enough, our skills are not sharp enough, and so we are secret frauds who don’t deserve our positions. There are many reasons why a lot of us struggle with imposter syndrome. It’s tied to perfectionism and the lie that “We must be perfect to be valid and valuable.”

It’s also tied to some issues in how our profession works. While courses and certifications do exist, most certifications are for established professionals, not entrants into the field. There is no clear standard way for us to know that we’re not just students anymore but ready to be professionals. Anyone can set up a freelance business and claim to be an editor. It’s up to us as individuals to decide when we’re ready to stop calling ourselves students and start calling ourselves professionals.

The fact that we often need to make that transition independently can lead to a lot of self-doubt about whether that decision was correct. There’s always more we can learn about language, communication, and storytelling, so editors never actually stop being students.

Given that there’s always more to learn, is there even a way to definitively know whether we know enough to deserve our positions? That lack of a clear definitive turning point is ripe soil for imposter syndrome.

Acknowledging Gender Influences

Lastly, I’ll also note that most of us editors tend to be women. There are absolutely men in the field of editing. However, if you attend an editing conference, you’ll see that somewhere between seventy and ninety percent of the speakers and participants are women. You’ll also see this trend in other corners of the literary world, such as in libraries. Most librarians also tend to be women.

The reason for this gender dynamic is quite complex. It’s likely tied to the European history of literary culture, where literature has often been viewed, treated, and experienced (and belittled) as a feminine domain.

So within editing culture, there’s a good chance that this tendency toward both perfectionism and imposter syndrome is also related to larger cultural influences around gender socialization and expectations.

Our European and North American culture tends to encourage men to be overconfident. At the same time, our culture tends to encourage women to be underconfident in certain ways. Women are more likely than men to doubt themselves and the validity of their skills within their social context. To see some evidence of this cultural trend and how it works, you can see this 2016 psychological study by Patrick Ring et al.[1]

So, learning how to push back against imposter syndrome can also be an act of rejecting the maladaptive aspects of our culture that we want to change.

With all this information in place, you have a better sense now of the editing community and culture. On the one hand, editors need to hold themselves to high standards to ensure their professionalism. On the other hand, editors also tend to struggle with perfectionism and imposter syndrome. Getting the balance right between high standards and self-compassion is tricky.

A Personal Example

Here’s a personal example. In a copy editing course I took, one of our reading materials was a list of guidelines for editors. One of those guidelines was the following principle: “First, insert no errors.” It was clearly an allusion to the Hippocratic oath, “First, do no harm.” This is an oath that doctors commonly make when they begin their practice. It’s a serious moral commitment that doctors use to hold themselves accountable for the serious impacts they can have on their vulnerable patients.

On one hand, “First, insert no errors” is a quick and witty way to remind editors to be mindful of the changes they make. It is very possible for us to insert an error into a text. We do need to be mindful and check ourselves for this foible.

On the other hand, “First, insert no errors” implies that inserting an error is as serious as causing harm in a medical practice. Likewise, in the editing community, inserting an error isn’t just treated as a mistake. It’s often treated as a big social taboo.

When I first mentioned this editing principle to my sister—and the anxiety it was giving me—she looked at me askance and said, “That saying’s for doctors treating patients. Typos aren’t that big of a deal.”

The thing is, my sister’s right.

The Takeaway

Don’t get me wrong—typos can:

• irritate or distract the reader,
• slow the reader down,
• make the text more difficult to read,
• or lower the reader’s sense of trust in the author.

Typos are important to catch, but I also wouldn’t call them harmful. They can be irritating or distracting, but in most cases, those impacts don’t reach the level of harm. In fact, when it comes to minor errors—like mixing up mantle and mantel—most readers don’t notice them. When readers do notice an odd error, most are very quick to move on. As a result, it actually takes a fair number of obvious errors to make a text more difficult to read and to lower the reader’s sense of trust in the author.

When professional copy editors do insert an error, it’s usually a minor one. “She pressed her hands against the mantle to warm them on the stones.” Those kinds of errors.

So, we should absolutely strive to insert no errors. But when we do make a mistake (because, by golly, we’re still human), we also don’t have to freak out and treat it like a mortal sin.

So, can good copy editors still make mistakes? Yes. We have to be able to because we’re still human. Striving for perfection does not enable us to make perfect things. It can empower us to make great things, though.

Tips for Authors & Editors

To really test an editor’s skill, you need to look at their work directly. Get a sample edit and see how many errors they catch. The professional rule of thumb is 90–95%. An inserted error should be very rare. Still, it’s not realistic or healthy to treat any mistake as enough to strip an editor of their professionalism.

Editors who meet the 90–95% benchmark—even with inserted errors counting against them—are still good editors. Their manuscripts are still better off because of their involvement.

In short, any assessment of an editor’s skill should be taken as part of a whole. We should be wary of mistakes, especially prolific ones. Still, one mistake should not be enough to erase one hundred other correct choices.

So authors: get that sample edit. Then use it to judge an editor’s skill directly and contextually.

Editors: this is my friendly reminder that we can be both rigorous and realistic. We can hold high standards while still being practical and compassionate, to both others and ourselves. I myself need that reminder regularly.

An Encouraging Note on Editing Culture (and Some Shameless Self-Promo)

I also do think we are making progress on having a healthier approach to this aspect of editing culture. As I was writing this post, Editors Canada’s webinar schedule came out, and I spotted this webinar: “Perfectly Imperfect: Accepting and Embracing ‘Good Enough’” by Rhonda Kronyk. The premise of the webinar is to help editors learn how to strike a healthy balance between high standards and self-compassion.

I’ll include the whole webinar description because it makes some great points about what we’ve just been talking about.

Editors take pride in submitting their best work to their clients, but many have learned not to read the published copies of the books they work on because they invariably find errors. We sometimes succumb to the illusion of perfection, which can cause self-doubt and imposter syndrome to sneak into our thinking. Knowing how powerful words are, the desire to avoid all mistakes can become overwhelming. Rhonda Kronyk will use her experiences as an editor and public speaker to help participants recognize when the desire to be perfect negatively affects their business and their mental health. Participants will get Rhonda’s strategies for accepting that ‘good enough’ does not mean submitting substandard work and is better for their mental and physical health.

Personally, I find it very encouraging that we’re having these discussions and making resources like this available.

On a side note, I’ll also be presenting a webinar with Editors Canada this fall on how to vet projects for sensitive themes. If that sounds like something you’d be interested in, you can learn more or book your spot here.

Back to the issue at hand: I hope you’ve found my thoughts on professional standards and perfectionism helpful. If you’d like to learn more about the world of editing, you can find links to related posts below. As always, happy writing everyone!

• Fiction Editing Basics: Three Things You Should Know Before Hiring an Editor
• How to Find the Right Editor for Your Book
• How to Disagree with Your Editor
• Which Editing Service Is Best for My Current Writing Stage?
• The Four Levels of Fiction Editing

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[1] Ring P, Neyse L, David-Barett T, Schmidt U. “Gender Differences in Performance Predictions: Evidence from the Cognitive Reflection Test.” Front Psychol. 2016 Nov 1;7:1680. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2016.01680. PMID: 27847487; PMCID: PMC5089055.

Though take this paper’s introduction and interpretation with a grain of salt. Their methods seem solid to me, and their data is helpful. However, the authors only suggest biological causes for these differences while ignoring the potential for social and environmental causes, even though there’s nothing in their correlational data to support the idea that biology is a more likely cause for these differences than socialization. This is a great example of why it’s so important to separate “findings” from “interpretation” in science. Findings are useless without interpretation, yet interpretation is so vulnerable to bias. I could write a whole other post on this topic, so I’ll leave it there.