You decide to spend the evening reading an adventurous detective, a translated, sentimental novel, or popular science fiction. You sit back, open the book, and immerse yourself in the intoxicating world of the work of fiction. You’re captivated by the dialogue, enthralled by the descriptions – you enjoy the read. But do you know who the reader owes this pleasure to? Most would answer: the author, of course. And only few people know that a high-quality, stylistically literate, talented text – is the result of joint work of the writer and … literary editor, to the share of which falls proofreading, and sometimes the real rewriting of the text. How do literary editors work, and what are the characteristics of their noble labor?
Literary editing is not a profession, but a calling. A special talent. A literary editor (aka litred) must excel the writer in his craft, because he must see stylistic bloopers and flaws, correct the roughness of the text, issuing completely ready-to-read material.
As a rule, literary and educational publishers recruit writers from the literary fraternity. The trick, however, is that you don’t need to have an understanding of classical philology to work as a littreader. What is required of a specialist is something else: literary flair. Among literary editors, you can meet former personnel managers, teachers, office workers, advertising professionals, sociologists – professional affiliation is not always important for a litrade, the main thing that the editor is able to identify speech, stylistic, grammatical errors and make a third-rate reading quite digestible text.
A read-along specialist.
Readers are constantly reading, as a consequence – a huge fatigue from the eternal stress, “washed out” eyes, the inability to perceive adequately any artistic text. LITREDITATING – it certainly is not the work of a jackhammer, but also not the simple reading of fascinating books in a comfortable chair: the editor must be extremely attentive and focused, otherwise – one missed awkward phrase, and the text falls apart, ceases to be artistic. This is why there are few good litredits – many simply cannot withstand the stress, cannot cope with the volume, the monotony and monotony, even writers with a keen literary flair are not all able to withstand such a load.
To appreciate the complexity of the littrade we suggest that you try to edit the following sentence yourself: “He squinted his eyes at her, passing by him for the hundredth time. Would you say that doesn’t happen? Among translated texts, it happens all the time.
