Concepts
- Editing
- How editing involves critical thinking
- Necessary vs. impulsive changes
- Improve writing rather than just fixing it
- The three main levels of editing
- Structural editing
- Stylistic editing
- Copy editing
- Developmental editing
- Improving content organization and structure
- Proofreading
- How and when to break the rules of style
- Cutting excessive verbiage
- ==Conciseness
- How to focus on the most important information
- How to rewrite to get rid of unnecessary words
- How to summarize information concisely
- How to use shorter words and sentences at the points of greatest complexity
- Redundancies
- Eliminating jargon, clutter, and acronyms that can jumble copy
- Plain language
- How to translate jargon into plain English
- Clarity
- Can reword appropriately to simplify, clarify or shorten text
- Can identify whether material is well expressed and flows logically, with the ideas and wording easy to follow
- Table
- Table vs. Figure
- Presenting data in tables
- Images
- Understands image resolution necessary for print and screen
- Understands terminology (eg half tone, greyscale, diagram, figure, caption etc)
- Understands numbering and placement of images
- Knows what to check in any illustration and its caption, including correspondence between the two
- Awareness of redundancy, ambiguity
- Understand when copyright permission might be needed
- Understand when to report material that could contravene laws regarding libel, obscenity, blasphemy, incitement to racial hatred, or plagiarism.
Facts
- Most common grammatical, punctuation, and usage errors
- ==Grammar
- Active voice
- Passive voice
- Sentence fragments
- Subject-verb agreement
- Essential and non-essential clauses
- Punctuation
- How to use the tools of punctuation to create pace and space
- Apostrophe usage with contractions, possessive pronouns and plural words
- Comma usage
- ==Usage
- Differences among Percent, Percentage Points and Percent Change
- Understanding the difference between prescriptive and descriptive principles in decisions about usage
- Recognizes other characters (eg Greek, Cyrillic)
- Recognizes diacritics and accents, common non-English characters
- Is aware of alternative transcriptions
- Is aware of common/less common foreign-language terms/names, guillemets, further diacritics, accents, capitalization
• Is alert to false friends
- Spelling
- Understanding the use of short forms, abbreviations and contractions
- Voice and tone
- Understanding reading level, register (degree of formality), and use of terminology appropriate to the type of publication and audience
- ==Numeracy
- Recognizes and knows how to use metric and imperial units
- Has ability to check arithmetic totals, calculate average/area/percentage, interpret graphs, deal with simple statistics
- Recognizes and knows how to calculate conversions
- Recognizes and knows how to use roman numerals
- Can spot significant errors of scale
- Understands conventions in use of numbers, dates, percentages, measurements, statistical data
- Recognizes common SI units and chemical elements
- Varieties of English
- Style
- How to write in a way that moves the reader steadily through the material
- How to write in a way that conveys not just meaning, but impact
- Transitions
- Understands judgement of sense: does content appear correct and appropriate for context? if doubtful: flag, query or change? Is change justified and appropriate?
- Understands vocabulary and idioms (corrects any easily confused words; if not the right word, can supply a suitable replacement)
- Understands and respects author’s voice but can assess whether suited to the content and the target/likely audience, appropriateness for context
- Style Manuals
- APA
- CMOS
- Citations, references, and bibliographies
- Understand the basic processes of producing a publication.
- Understand how to use mark-up symbols and conventions according to the client’s or designer’s specification.
- Understand the conventions for information that must or may be included in prelim pages and endmatter, and prepare copy as necessary/required.
Procedures
- Developing a process for editing to fully prepare a piece.
- ==Developing my own editorial checklists
- Revising sentences, paragraphs, and passages to resolve ambiguities, ensure logical connections, and clarify meaning
- ==Writing clear, respectful, diplomatic, and helpful queries and comments
- Explaining why a change is needed
- Understands judgement required for author queries (when, what and how) and how many queries are appropriate
- Can ask relevant client queries (remit, style, problems), and to judge how many, when and how to ask
- Can formulate clear, concise, useful questions
- Creating a style guide
- Learning and setting up appropriate macros
- Using templates and style sheets in editing
- Fact-checking
- How to recognize the red flags in writing that require a closer look
- Where to find the best verification resources, both online and in print
- How to determine whether a resource is reliable
- Managing relationships with writers and giving them helpful feedback
- Creating and editing a table in Word
- Creating an illustrations list, with suitably shortened entries
- Consistency
- Handling figures, images, and tables in a text.
- Cross-referencing text, in-text citations, bibliographical references, tables, figures, and footnotes.
- Understand the basic principles of an index and be able to edit one.
- Know on-screen editing
- Know website editing
- Making content web friendly (make scanning easier, create sentences and paragraphs that are shorter than the equivalent printed text and insert concise, factual subheadings every two or three paragraphs.)
- Write concise descriptive headings and summaries of web pages, which can be used on higher-level pages to link them to those web pages or as file descriptions (metadata) that can be found by a search engine.
- Rewrite sentences so that the target (internal or external) of a linked word or phrase is clear, avoiding the use of ‘Click here’ or ‘More’ wherever possible. Check that all links work and whether the client wishes to include a disclaimer for the content of external sites.
- Advise on the splitting of content across additional linked pages (modules) to facilitate direct access to those additional pages from elsewhere on the site and from search engines.
- Access and comment on the functionality of multimedia files integrated with web pages – for example, audio, video, animations – and any associated text. Liaise with the author, designer or developer, depending on the editor’s content knowledge, to amend these elements if necessary.
- Write or edit text that describes images, other multimedia elements and links, for use when images are turned off or when a screen reader is being used by a visually impaired user.
- Create a site map to describe all or part of a website or add to an existing one.
Proofreading
- Pagination
- Ensure that the page sequence within the document is complete.
- Paragraphs
- If paragraphs are numbered, ensure that the numbering sequence is correct.
- Using the editor’s style guide when proofreading.
- Follow the editorial style guide (the list of spellings, etc adopted by the copyeditor and passed on to the proofreader) if provided. If this is not available, compile a style guide while reading the proofs. Do not seek to amend or ‘improve’ a copyeditor’s work unless specifically asked to do so by the client. Errors and omissions should, of course, be corrected or queried.
- Chapter and/or section titling.
- Ensure that chapter titles and subheadings in the contents page(s) and the body of the text correspond, and insert page numbers or ensure that, if present, they correspond.
- Running heads
- Ensure that running heads are correct and correspond to the convention required.
- Headings
- Check that type size, style and fonts all appear consistent.
- Fonts, alignment and line length
- Identify erroneous font changes, misalignments and inappropriate line lengths and suggest corrected formats. Check alignment of columns in tables.
- Page design
- Check bad word breaks and column breaks, and eliminate widows and orphans if required by the client. In books with a complex design layout (many illustrations, tables, etc), ensure that these are placed logically and that the text can be read easily.
- Collation
- Proofreaders may be required to collate proof-correction marks made by several individuals – for example, author, adviser, other proofreader. Where comments are in conflict, the proofreader/proof collator should be able to make justifiable judgements and amend appropriately, to maintain the required quality of the final product, the schedule, the budget and good author relations.