Desirable Characteristics for an Editor (Not to be confused with What Makes an Editor Sexy)

As a follow-on from Do You Want Editing With That?, I give you a list of Desirable Characteristics for an Editor[i].

1. An expansive knowledge of the English language – or whatever language you’re writing in.
2. An in-depth knowledge of grammar, its rules and regulations.
3. Possession of the secret of where to put commas, apostrophes, colons and semi-colons.
4. Someone who can spot a comma splice a mile away and banish it with a wave of a coloured pen[ii].
5. A glossy coat and a cool, wet nose.
6. Someone who knows when to dash, em dash or en dash.
7. An appreciation/understanding of what you’re trying to do with your writing.
8. Brutal honestly coupled with tact and sympathy.[iii]
9. An eye for repetition of both word and phrase, her/his own set of official Highlighters of Doom™ and a willingness to use them.
10. A really, really big vocabulary, but also the knowledge that sometimes a ten cent word is just as effective as a five dollar one.
11. Possession of a good dictionary and thesaurus.
12. Someone with proven professional experience, who can show you a folio of work that displays that they know what they’re doing.
13. Tall, dark – ooops, sorry, wrong list.
14. A secret superpower, just to make them a bit interesting.

What you don’t want in your editor:

1. A frustrated desire to be a writer that manifests itself as a tendency to re-write your work into ‘something they would have written, if they could’.
2. A lack of care about what you write.
3. Someone who tells you you’re a genius all the time and never tells you anything negative (the Law of Averages means you’re probably not a genius – I know I’m not).
4. Someone who can’t spell or differentiate between ‘there’, ‘their’ and ‘they’re’, or ‘your’ and ‘you’re’ and ‘yore’.
5. Flatulence and fussy eating habits, a tendency to scratch the furniture.

[i] My personal opinions only – other people may want different qualities in their chosen editors.

[ii] I personally require an editor with special comma splice spotting powers.

[iii] Yes, I know and I’d like a pony for Christmas too please, Santa.