Hi. My name is Lynn, and I am The Mountain-Ear’s primary copy editor. What that means for you is that you get to read a newspaper that is (mostly) error-free, that you can read easily without startling at some complicated wording or a “they” that could refer to several different people in the previous sentence.

What it means for me (and by “it,” I mean my copy editing) is that every week I travel through a jungle of grammatical and factual errors on the part of our superb writing team, trying to make their articles as clear and accurate as I possibly can. And in the process, I encounter situations where I actually find myself suffering physically from those textual problems.

Crazy? No. Another editor friend sent me an article the other day confirming that I really am not nuts. It starts: “Even the sound of bad grammar can make language lovers wince. And now experts have revealed it does cause indeed a physical reaction – and even affects our heart rate.”

Well, THAT makes me feel justified, as I delete some wording and remind the writer to GO READ THE STYLE SHEET! (which I wrote, by the way). I even want to copy-edit that statement: hmmm…does language lovers need a hyphen? Who are the “experts”? (Well, that gets answered in another paragraph.) Who is the “our” in that second sentence?

The experts are at the University of Birmingham in England, who “recruited… English-speaking adults who listened to 40 speech samples, half of which contained grammatical errors.” It turned out that the more errors these poor guinea pigs heard, “the more their heartbeat showed signs of stress.” (“Heartbeat” should have been”heartbeats,” making the pronoun and noun agree.)

See? It’s automatic. It’s a fatal flaw in my language-loving personality. This reaction appears, the article says, “to activate a ‘fight or flight’ response in the body.” Except that the article uses single quotation marks around “fight or flight,” which I did because it was a quote within a quote, but in the original article it was a standalone quote which requires double quotation marks – unless – aha! The article was written in Britain, where they use quotation marks in the opposite way from us…(and she continues in this vein until she is led away to a nice soft padded room).

Seriously, readers, this is what it’s like to be a copy editor. Every comma, hyphen, colon and semicolon has to be perfect, or my heart breaks. It’s a disease, I tell you. And it’s one I feel compelled to share with all the poor writers who are subject to my edits. I imagine them shaking in their boots, worrying about how Lynn will un-torture their prose as she attempts to rid herself of this painful virus.

I confess that I even mentally copy-edit the people around me as they casually make common errors in speech or writing. Did you actually say “David and me went to the movies”? Did you really use an apostrophe to make a plural, as in “Christmas’s” when you mean “Christmases”? Of course, I never say anything. But I judge. Oh, boy, do I judge.

And don’t get me started on how I react to errors in published works. I’ve chatted quietly with other editors about the fact that too many publishers seem to have decided that they can save money by not hiring copy editors.

But thank goodness Barb Hardt had the prescience to save the lives of countless language-loving readers by hiring crazy people like me to make your reading smooth and easy when you pick up The Mountain-Ear. Don’t thank me, though. I’m just trying to keep my heartbeat in the normal range.