What does a copy editor do (and not do)?Ī professional copy editor will thoroughly work through your text, making changes that perfect your manuscript by improving accuracy, grammar, punctuation, and spelling, and eliminating redundancies in your text. A detailed style sheet is an organized way for an editor to maintain consistency and communicate a manuscript’s style to the author and future proofreaders. A novel’s style sheet should include notes on typography, punctuation, numbers, and spellings a list of characters, real people, and places and a timeline of events. To keep track of the styles in use in a single manuscript, copy editors create a style sheet as they edit. And then we’ve had a copy editor take a look at it to make sure we had done so consistently. For example, on this page, we’ve decided to write “copy editing” and “copy editor” without hyphenation. Using these references as guides, copy editors will correct errors and fix inconsistencies in details like number treatment (should it be a numeral or spelled out?), compound words (should it be open, closed, or hyphenated?), and punctuation (should it be a comma or semicolon?).
Editors also set a specific dictionary as the authority, such as Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary.
#Types of manuscript editing manual
These include The Chicago Manual of Style, The Associated Press Stylebook, and Words into Type.
#Types of manuscript editing manuals
Individual copy editors consult a range of manuals for copy editing. They’ll pull your book together page by page.īut where can you find a meticulous copy editor with the right experience to take your manuscript to the next level? They’ll save your tone and style from unintentionally wild shifts between sections.
They’ll catch scenes in which your antagonist is wearing sunglasses and spectacles at the same time. They won’t enter into big-picture issues such as characterization, plot or pacing instead, they will go through the manuscript line by line and focus on all the little things you might not have thought about. Professional copy editors can make sure your manuscript isn’t riddled with bad grammar, spelling mistakes, or glaring inconsistencies. Overall, The purpose of copy editing is to ensure that the language supports the writer’s intent - while also creating the most readable version of their book. Book proposal Web design Translation What is Copy Editing?Ĭopy editing is the act of fine-tuning a book’s text, otherwise known as the ‘copy.’ A copy edit will generally address grammatical or punctuation errors, incorrect facts, anomalies, inconsistencies and glaring typos.
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