Be Your Own Editor

Rao from Bangalore, India, asks:

Please tell me:
What copyediting is.
What is expected of a copyeditor.

As I mentioned in my previous post about the role of a book designer, in the most basic terms, the copyeditor takes a manuscript that’s fresh out of an author’s printer and prepares it for the compositor/typesetter. The process involves numerous steps that can play a huge role in shaping a book.

When you think of a copyeditor, you probably imagine someone poring over a manuscript with a red pencil, correcting spelling and grammar mistakes. That’s part of a copyeditor’s job, to be sure. That and a lot more. Even in our increasing electronic times, most publishers still have copyediting done on hard copy, rather than on electronic files. (The reason has to do in part with preventing the world’s copyeditors from going blind.) One way copyediting has changed is that it’s usually done by freelancers, rather than in house at the publisher. Larger publishers employ “production editors” (that’s my job!) to shepherd the text from the manuscript stage to the final bound book. The production editor hires a copyeditor for each title.

The first thing that determines what is expected of a copyeditor is whether the book’s editor feels it needs a light, medium, or heavy copyedit. “Heavy” would entail more substantive editing of the text, “light” means correct only egregious errors of spelling, grammar, and punctuation, and “medium” is, well, somewhere in between. Generally, a lighter copyedit is expected in fiction or memoir, and a heavier job is more acceptable in nonfiction genres such as history, self-help, etc. In all cases, the copy editor must walk a fine line between polishing the text and interfering with the author’s voice.

What else does a copyeditor do besides fix the aforementioned spelling, grammar, and punctuation? In terms of the actual writing, they look for passages or individual words that are repeated. They query anything confusing or inconsistent (brown eyes on page 4, hazel on page 235). If there are notes, they make sure they correspond properly to the text. They impose a consistent style of spelling, etc., and make up a “style sheet” that includes a word list (is “short-sleeve shirt” or “short-sleeved shirt” the style of this book? How are we spelling “Yasir Arafat”?). The style sheet should also list general style choices the author has employed and the copyeditor has made consistent, such as whether to use series comma, whether words are capitalized following a colon, etc.

The copyedited manuscript is sent to the author for review, and the author will usually “stet” some of the copyeditor’s changes. “Stet” tells the typesetter to ignore the editing mark and set the text as typed. It can get complicated if the production editor feels the author has been too stet-happy, and the book’s editor agrees and crosses out some of the author’s stets. Conflicts ensue. Even if the copyeditor has done a good job, such situations arise… Authors can be a little too closely attached to the words exactly as they wrote them. Or, in many cases, it’s a judgment call in which the author’s choice is the one that best expresses what they wish to express. The best-case scenario occurs with an experienced, talented copy editor and an author who both knows what he/she wants and respects the work of the copy editor.

Other parts of a copyeditor’s job include:

• Coding design elements in a manuscript so the typesetter knows how everything should look. Again, see my post about book designers. Coding is sometimes done by someone at the publishing house, like the designer or production editor; it varies.
• Marking certain items in the text to clarify them for the typesetter; for example, if there’s a hyphen at the end of a line in the manuscript, the copyeditor indicates whether that hyphen is “hard” (belongs in the text no matter where it falls) or “soft” (there only because it’s breaking a word at the end of a line). They indicate whether dashes should be hyphens, em dashes, or en dashes.
• Making stylistic decisions the author may never even have considered. For example, should “words as words” be set in italics, or in roman text within quote marks? (The word “word” is a very important word.) Some authors, especially experienced ones, do consider such things, but most don’t. Once they see the copyeditor’s work, though, they may become more aware and develop a preference.
• Fact-checking. Ideally, if there’s time, the copyeditor should verify the spelling of every proper name in the book and check that everything, from dates to scientific facts to whether the protagonist could actually get from Texas to Maine in three hours by car, checks out. The Internet, of course, has made fact-checking 1,000 times easier, although copy editors must be careful not to trust any old website they come across.

I could list a hundred more specific things copyeditors do. And what exactly falls within the realm of their job is also dictated by differences between publishing houses, types of book (e.g., trade vs. textbooks), and copyeditors’ own personal styles of work. If you want to delve more deeply into the job, I recommend Amy Einsohn’s The Copyeditor’s Handbook: A Guide for Book Publishing and Corporate Communications.

Thanks for the question, Rao, and please let me know if you any more specific questions that I didn’t answer.

This entry was posted on Monday, March 5th, 2007 at 6:15 pm and is filed under Readers Q&A, Self-publishing, The Book Business. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.