Laura, I know exactly how you feel; I've had a couple of experiences with GEs making changes to my stories without asking me, and the first I knew was when I saw the uploaded version. One was formatting: the style of dash I use ( - ) had been changed to (--). The other was spelling: 'jewellery' had been changed to 'jewelry'.
On the other hand, I'm one of the Archive's longest-standing GEs and, speaking from experience, I can tell you that there are times when I will make changes to a story's formatting - and even changes to spelling, grammar etc - without consulting the author. Why? Well, one reason is because it's made clear to GEs time and again that we should not spend longer on a story than the author did. Now, that point won't apply to most people posting here but, believe me, there have been many times when I've received a story with so many errors that it would triple the length of the story if I catalogued every one - not to mention the fact that it would take hours, if not days. And the couple of times I did actually highlight every change, I got a note back from the author saying 'do what you like, I don't care'. Yes, literally.
I don't care.
Other than the error-ridden author who doesn't want to know what I'm fixing, what else don't I flag every time? Well, repeated spelling or grammatical errors - I'll point them out the first couple of times, and thereafter will simply correct them. Also formatting problems - I tend to assume, for example, that authors don't want to be told that I've removed é and converted it to e, because the Archive formatting can't support accents. I might list this in my covering email, but it's one of those very routine edits which we do without thinking.
The first thing I do when I get a story is do a search and replace on hard returns - stories often come either with short lines or the alternate very short/long lines, and I need to get rid of all that. But it would never occur to me to say to an author, "As part of reformatting the story, I took out the hard returns which get into it in transit".
I also sometimes have to remove superfluous spaces at the start of paras, where an author has accidentally pressed the space bar before the first letter of the new para; again, that's not something I would feel the need to point out. It's a simple slip of the typing thumb, and not exactly something to look out for to avoid doing again. Likewise, if for 99% of the dashes an author has used, the formatting is like so--but for a couple it's like this -- I will correct the inconsistent ones. And since that just looks like a typo I certainly wouldn't include it as part of the summary sheet; if it gets mentioned at all it would be a passing comment in my covering note.
So I suppose what I'm saying is that there are things GEs need to do to stories which we might not think that authors would even be interested in knowing about - simple, routine formatting when we get the story, the occasional repeated error or very minor and obvious typo. And there's a balance here between giving the author a long, long list of every detail and telling the author about the important changes. And it's also worth bearing in mind that for every author who wants to know every single detail there will be two or three (or more) who will barely read the GE's report. That's been my experience over the years, certainly.
That
doesn't mean I don't believe that an author has a right to a say over what the GE does to their story! Absolutely not! But I would simply ask authors to remember that GEs do this job for
no reward. We're volunteers. Many of us are also BRs, and some are also writers. And we have lives. We want to give authors the very best service we can, nonetheless - but sometimes we might get it wrong. Or make the wrong choice in terms of that 'balance' I mentioned. I know that authors appreciate and value the work we do, and I'm sure you'll cut us some slack - over your missing double-spaces or anything else.
Wendy
