Advice for Copyeditors

I’m trying to get ready to go out of town and deal with the loose ends regarding my mother’s estate, so today’s post will be short and sweet, and Thursday’s post may well be absent, or equally brief.

This blog often offers advice for new writers, but advice for new copyeditors is very important as well.

The Subversive Copyeditor blogged some random advice for copyeditor newbies today, and it’s all important stuff.

I would move back a step and add a few absolute basics to that excellent list:

• Pick a single style guide and a single dictionary and stick to them. It should be no surprise that different style guides (Chicago vs AP vs MLA) will feature very different rules. If they didn’t, each style of publication wouldn’t have its own. However, different dictionaries will also allow/feature slight variations. Don’t pick the one that agrees with you on a particular word, pick one standard reference and make it your guide. I also pick one standard backup dictionary, just in case.

• Look up EVERYTHING you think you know. Sometimes colloquial usage isn’t the same as correct usage. Before you switch “never mind” to one word throughout a manuscript because that’s the way you’ve always spelled it, look it up. Look up “lie/lay/lain/laid” and make yourself a grid. Don’t go with what “sounds right,” take the time to find out what IS right.

• Don’t overcorrect, either. Editing fiction isn’t the same as editing non-fiction. There’s a lot more latitude in fiction, especially in regard to dialogue and narrative voice. If a character is young, uneducated, informal, or would have some other reason to use “there’s” to mean “there are,” let the character use it. If a character never uses contractions, ever, then help the author stay true to that style choice. It’s important to develop a sense of what to correct and what to leave alone.

• If you find yourself looking up the same things all the time, write them out on a separate cheat-sheet for yourself. I do this for things like grey/gray (I never remember which one is the UK spelling and which one is US), or whether song lyrics get quotation marks or italics. I always write out the full rule with the citation so that I can cite my source without having to go back to the book.

• Be aware of your tone with clients, whether authors or employers. Keep it professional but approachable. Never, ever taunt or insult a client for a mistake in the manuscript or word your queries in such a way as to imply a value judgment about the manuscript or the specific choices therein. In your queries and comments, speak in terms of rules of grammar or style, in terms of character consistency, or ambiguity of phrase, or the conventions of the genre. It’s okay to use a lighthearted tone if you’ve got sufficient rapport with a client to do so appropriately (and even then, know the boundaries). Don’t go over the line into too familiar, too risque, patronizing, or disapproving. It’s not your place.

• If you’ve decided to make cold calls (writing or calling a publisher to ask them if they have work they can give you), do your homework before you send a letter to someone and ask them to hire you. Get your contact name right, and get the gender of that contact person right, too. Please spell-check your letter. Check to make sure that you remove the lingering form-letter bits from your last letter that don’t fit your current one. And, just like writers submitting queries for manuscripts, take an extra moment to find out if they’re actually hiring, and if they have a process for sending that letter. Editing is a detail-oriented job, so you’ll only shoot yourself in the foot if you fail to pay attention to the details when you make your first impression.

(Also see: The Last-Glance Editing Checklist)

Tagged as: copyediting, editing