We’ve all read those humorous hooks for getting into copyediting — get paid to read! Wow, sounds fantastic, doesn’t it?
While getting paid to read sounds like fun, copyediting isn’t simply reading for pleasure. You’re reading each line of text in a piece to make sure that the copy is clean. You’re eliminating errors while still maintaining the author’s voice.
When you’re being paid to help clean up someone’s copy before they publish it, your job is to make sure that zero* errors make it through your reads. *Of course, we’re all human beings, so you will miss some things (unless you’re an AI bot, and then, no, you’re not human, and you’re not good, so far, at fact-checking and making sure that the copy you’re editing is the best it can be). That tricky double “the” or that “costumer” when you meant “customer” (or even worse, “pubic” when you meant “public”).
The following are five tips I’ve learned to employ over time to help reduce the errors that slip through the cracks when I’m copyediting.
1. Read headlines backward
The key to good copyediting is to not let your eyes (and your thoughts) race ahead of the words on the page. When you read, it can be very tempting to skim and move quickly because your brain can understand the meaning of a sentence and a paragraph even when it reads only some of the key words. When you edit headlines and subheads, they are short, so the temptation is very strong to quickly read them and move on. This is a mistake. Headlines are bold and stand out. Errors that creep into these pieces of text will also stand out and make you cringe with embarrassment if they make it into the published piece.
During your final checks, make sure to read each headline slowly and backward. Doing this takes your brain out of automatic mode and causes you to read each word for what it is. You won’t be tempted to fill in the gaps.
2. Read a hard copy (read in a different area/desk/space)
This tip is also about getting your brain out of automatic mode. I always try to build in time into a project to complete a final read that I can do on hard copy. Of course, sometimes timelines are too tight, and you won't have that luxury. You can then triage and review certain items, like the table of contents, headers, figures and tables, on hard copy if that’s all you have time to do. Doing that helps you to see the content differently, and you can catch mistakes that eluded your initial edit. It is also a great way to remove any and all distractions that are there when you are editing digitally.
The second part of this tip is also about getting you out of that automatic reading mode. I sit at my office desk with the same two desk lamps, my little quartz crystals, and a small Lucio (healer with the beats in the Overwatch video game) Funko toy. It’s my cozy setup, and as soon as I sit in my chair, my brain goes into auto mode. Moving my laptop to a different room, sitting outside, or even moving to a café for a bit can get your mind out of that auto mode and help you to slow down to catch more errors.
3. Create an exclude custom dictionary
I can’t recommend this tip enough. No matter how slow you read, you’re bound to gloss over those words that are so similar in the way that they are spelled but that are worlds apart in meaning. No spell-check is going to catch “costumer,” but that article about improving customer experience is certainly not about someone who makes costumes.
Word processing tools give you the ability to add words to a custom dictionary. You can also exclude certain words, which means that it will highlight those words as misspelled in your document, causing you to slow down and determine if that is the word you actually meant to read. I use this for words like costumer, pubic, reigns, and pear.
This has made me so much more confident in signing off on a final copy — let me tell you about the time before I added “pubic” to my exclude dictionary…
4. Read the text out loud
Punctuation, independent and dependent clauses, long sentences and short sentences — all of these elements help to build the rhythm and structure of a piece. When you’re reading this visually, you can sometimes miss the actual rhythm and beat of the sentence. Especially if you’re copyediting a particularly dense work, like scientific research, it can be hard to fully understand the meaning of the sentence. That’s why I like to read challenging sentences out loud.
When you read that sentence and find yourself stumbling, chances are the punctuation, the added pauses, are not correct. I often find that I can more easily spot errors after reading a particular difficult section out loud.
5. Create a to-dos/final checks list as you edit
Some fixes you will need to make will have to be done across an entire manuscript — for example, if a style guide needs you to remove spaces before and after an em dash (—), you will need to make that fix everywhere the author used that punctuation (and for some authors, well, that is quite the monumental task). Rather than making that universal change right when I discover the first instance, I will add it to my list of final to-dos. This helps me to speed up that initial read and to keep the flow and bigger picture in mind when I’m reading a long manuscript.
One thing you will want to be careful of when you do get to your final checks is to not rely on an automatic "find and replace" function for those items you’ve added (such as the em dash fix). You may automatically insert errors, so I will always manually accept or reject changes. I also don’t solely rely on "find and replace" since you may miss actual misspelled words (like “Dwigt” eluding the find and replace in Michael Scott’s screenplay masterpiece, “Threat Level Midnight.”)
Keep in mind that this isn’t an exhaustive list by any means, and I will be writing about more copyediting tips in the future. These are ones that I use on every copyediting project, however. They all have the theme of slowing you down so that you can catch even the slipperiest of errors.
Happy editing!
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