Robot

“Sometimes, your eyes see something your brain doesn’t. You pick up a newspaper and your head gives you a phrase that you didn’t consciously read yet. You walk into a room and you realize something’s out of place before you’ve bothered to properly look.”

--from Linger by Maggie Stiefvater

I often feel like I exist in the gray area, career-wise. I work in education, but I am not a teacher. I work in publishing, but I don’t work for a publisher. I don’t work in corporate America, but I’m also not quite in academia. Honestly, I really enjoy this ambiguity. It allows me to dip my toes in several different career ponds without feeling like I am stuck in any of them.

One of the weirdest things about my job, I think, is the way my skills are somewhat divorced from my education. My background is in mathematics and learning sciences, and I do believe that is critically important to being able to do my job well. But my marketable skill set is in editorial. I think of education and editorial as the two, rather separate hats I have to wear in while completing my day-to-day work tasks.

I will freely admit that I wasn’t very good at either aspect of my job when I started. I’ve been able to really refine and develop my ability to think like a mathematics educator through graduate school, attendance at conferences, and simply talking with my colleagues (who happen to be among the best in the field). Almost every day at my job is a professional development opportunity in that sense, and I’m lucky that way.

Appropriate editorial professional development opportunities are harder to come by. There are certification programs I could go through to show that I am proficient with the Chicago Manual of Style, but because I work on materials intended for young children, we mostly work from our own specialized style guide. I am as familiar with the CMS as I need to be. I honestly could not tell you if there are editorial conferences, but even if they are, I doubt that I would find them very useful. The materials that I edit just have too many unusual characteristics about them.

Thus, I have not made much conscious effort to develop my editorial skills over the years. Lucky for me, these skills seem to have developed quite nicely on their own through years of practice.

Most days, I feel like my subconscious does most of the work for me. The kinds of information that I can pick up from a glance at a page of one of our books is really kind of fascinating. Sometimes, I can glance at a page and my eyes are immediately drawn to an error. Other times, I take a quick glance and know that somewhere, there is a hyphen missing, but I have to look again carefully to find where it is. Still other times, I can look at a page and just know that something is not right, though it often takes me some time to figure out what it is.

This phenomenon fascinates me. I have so many questions about it. I’m sure it’s a skill that develops through practice, but did I do something specific to help it along? Is it some sort of photographic memory? Do I actually pick up so much information with a glance at a page that my working memory can’t hold the location of the missing hyphen along with everything else? Why can I instantly see errors on the pages of math textbooks when I can read my own writing ten times and still miss blatant typos?

On a different track, here is another question. How much of it is just a basic survival instinct? The feeling I get when I know something is wrong with a page is similar to the feeling I get when I walk into my apartment and know someone has been there in my absence (or my cat has knocked something down). I can’t always see it right away, but I know that something has been disturbed or moved. It’s the same sense of not-right-ness.

Getting back to the idea of professional development, is this something that could be taught? Familiarity with the thing you are editing is important, of course. Someone who has never seen one of our math books would never be able to sense that something is wrong with a page the way I do. But is the skill generalizable?

Despite how little I know about my ability to sense missing hyphens and incorrect fonts, I am grateful for it. It removes a lot of the tedium from my job. I think of it as my own version of the Lost in Space robot, except instead of saying, “Danger, Will Robinson, danger!” it says, “Error, editor Katie, error!”

My error robot is awesome. I’ve come to think of the Lego robot on my desk as a sort of portrait of him. He’s a great defender of mathematical accuracy and a fierce opponent of bad grammar. I think Stephen would be proud.