Introduction to copy-editing and proofreading skills

What is editing? The editorial process. Editing, writing and rewriting. The need for several passes.  Dealing with authors. Copyright issues. Copy-editing vs proofreading. Importance of consistency, conforming to house or journal style. Style sheets. Editing on-screen and on hard copy, typescripts and proofs. Editing and proofreading marks. How many passes? Identifying versions.

Editing for structure and flow

What to look for - logic, order, length, repetition, redundancy, irrelevancy and emphasis. Restructuring for interest and emphasis. Structuring techniques. Editing to length. Headings - rewriting and adding new ones. Tables, figures, how many and what kind? Creating figures and tables from nothing. Turning tables into figures. References - are there enough and are they the right ones?

Structuring sentences

Sentence length, splitting and combining sentences, expanding and contracting sentences, eliminating wordiness, sentence unity, avoiding unrelated ideas, avoiding mixed metaphors and constructions, parallelism, varying sentence structure, dealing with dependent and independent clauses, placement of examples and descriptive details, parenthetical clauses, passive vs active, transitions within and between sentences

Vocabulary and formality

Recognising the needs of your audience, writing to make readers feel comfortable, ‘literary’ versus ‘scientific’ style, precise words, appropriate and inappropriate, variation, clichés and trite expressions, jargon versus technical language, precise word choice, setting the right tone and level of formality, appropriate use of adjectives and adverbs, powerful words, adding drama (or removing it), positives and negatives, connecting words and transitions, appropriate and inappropriate ‘hedging’, treading the fine line between formality and pretentiousness, pleasures and pitfalls of a large vocabulary

Editing text for consistency

Completeness and length. Headings. Lists. Indents. Correct use of caps, small caps, italics, bold. Abbreviations and symbols. Special characters. Dashes, hyphens, etc. Quotes. Numerals and equations. Units and associated spacing. Brackets and parentheses. Missing and duplicated text. Spelling. Table and figure references. Editing references. Standard styles. Things to check: all elements present, punctuation, type style, abbreviation of journal titles. Text citations and match with reference list.

Editing tables and figures

Types of table and figure. Need for redrawing. Sizing. Proportions of tables. Position in text. Table numbering. Table titles. Column and row headings. Indents. Cell content. Dealing with blank cells. Checking the maths. Abbreviations. Minimising the amount of text in row and column headings. Choice of units. Parallelism in headings. Footnotes. Types of figure. Simplifying/improving figures. Lettering and symbols. Editing axis labels. Colour and shading. Converting slides into printed figures. Editing table and figure titles. Credit lines and permissions.

Checking page layout

Checking for aesthetics and logic. How to cure common problems. White space. Page and section breaks. Columns and justification. Relationship of tables, figures and pull-quotes to body text. Widows and orphans, line breaks. Page layout improvement exercise.

Grappling with grammar

Common errors to look out for e.g. sentence fragments, run-on sentences, subject–verb mismatches, singulars and plurals, wrongly used auxiliary verbs, dangling participles and misplaced modifiers, wrongly used tenses, incorrect use of articles, me, myself, I, me and us, who and whom, position of ‘only’, ‘therefore’ and ‘however’, overlong strings of nouns, unattached pronouns, that and which, prepositional phrases, hanging comparatives, position of prepositions, split infinitives, not only but also, double negatives, compared to/with and many other problems.

Perfecting punctuation

Correct use of full stops, commas, hyphens, semi-colons, colons, question marks, exclamation marks, apostrophes (possessives and contractions), quotation marks.

Correcting word choice

Commonly misused words, sexist and dehumanizing terms, homonyms, homophones and homographs, confusing word pairs, misspellings, redundancy, economy of language.