When we started Book Oven, we came up with this … intriguing … idea of Bite-Size Edits, a new way to think about proofreading. Proofreading and copyediting are tough, honorable jobs, and they’re essential for the production of good texts.
But, what if you could break up the job of a proofreader, let a few people look at a few sentences, instead of one person looking at all of them? What if we took a text, chopped it up into pieces, and served those sentences randomly to people who cared about that text? That was the idea behind Bite-Size Edits, which has been hidden inside Book Oven for a while now. Today, we set it free, as a stand-alone site.
It turns out that Bite-Size Edits has resonated. All sorts of interesting discoveries have emerged about Bite-Size Edits: editors seem to get addicted to editing, especially if they like the text they are working on; writers get surprisingly useful feedback in addition to typo-fixing, even from strangers; editors who work on Bite-Size Edits feel a real attachment to the texts they work on, even if they have read only random sentences; writers start to feel great joy in seeing edits from certain editors.
We have some exciting plans in the works. In the mean time, we’ve got a useful, bare bones, but still-fun tool to help you get help cleaning up your texts, help you get feedback on your text. We’d like you to try it out. This is version 1 of the newly-independent Bite-Size Edits, with a few rough corners. Improvements and much more on the way. So head on over to Bite-Size Edits, stick in some text, and try it for yourself, or invite a few editors by email, by Twitter – or from your blog. And please, let us know what you think.
Oh, and would you like to help us make a modern, free public domain translation of Homer’s Illiad? It’s a little experiment, but all you have to do is update a couple the sentence here, from archaic English to something more modern:
The Free Modern Translation of the Illiad Project
2 Comments
As an editor, copy editor, proofreader both in the trenches as a managing editor with major publishers for over 20 years, I believe that your whole premise is incredibly flawed to the point of being idiotic. This is not to say that it won’t be successful, given the innate stupidity and the MTV-reality show-make-me-famous-now-driven mentality of the general public.
If you “break up” the editing or proofreading tasks among several sets of eyes you’ll rule out ANY possibility for a coherent and consistent final product. This will keep my professional proofreaders in business for a long time into the future, since the crap generated by your ridiculous tool will need to be fixed by a pro. For that I thank you.
David George
Hi David, Thanks for the comments. I think this is a misunderstanding of what we’re up to. I agree completely that Bite-Size Edits could never replace a good professional proofread; less so a good professional copy edit; and certainly can’t get anywhere near something like a full contextual edit.
But, on the other hand, it might have some uses. The telephone is in so many ways an inferior experience when compared with talking face-to-face, and email is in some ways a poor cousin to the hand-written letter, and … etc. Not to equate Bite-Size Edits with such tech advances, just to point out that technologies can be useful by making it easier to get some things done, even if they are “inferior” to previous (and parallel) methods.
In the case of Bite-Size Edits, our real interest is connecting readers, writers, and editors together around text. In some cases these will be independent writers, who don’t have access to professional editors; or, established writers, seeking a rich connection with readers through their text.
A not insignificant fringe-benefit to that connection is better text coming out the other end. And the hope, actually, is that writers and editors who find each other on Bite-Size Edits might go on to forge deeper working relationships.
So the question isn’t so much: is Bite-Size Edits better than a professional editor? Rather: can Bite-Size Edits usefully connect writers, editors and readers?