Copyediting and Proofreading Your Own Work

Sending an editor really clean copy is a big plus.

In the old days, clean copy meant it didn’t have any smudges or coffee splashes or penciled corrections. Now it means your manuscript has words spelled correctly, capital letters and punctuation used properly, paragraphing is appropriate, and apostrophes are in the right places.

One editor I sent articles to regularly said my copy was the cleanest of any he received. If my memory is not too fuzzy, he changed a sentence only once.

I have always been a good speller. As a child I read voraciously (same as you), and I learned to “see” a misspelled word. Even when I write, if I mistype a word, it pops right out at me, and I have to correct it. If it looks funny, I’ll check it in the dictionary even if Microsoft Word doesn’t underline it.

I cut my teeth in the writing game as a newsletter editor for any organization I belonged to – a church committee, an Audubon chapter, a writer’s group, a school group. Those who sent me information to go in the newsletter expected their copy to come out readable and accurate – no matter what they had written for me! And some of them arrived as penciled notes and incomplete sentences, or even as a telephone call. It didn’t pay, but I learned a lot.

Later I edited two Florida magazines where I served as Lord-High-Everything-Else, from acquiring articles and photos, copyediting, dealing with pre-computer typesetting, proofing, paste-up on boards (anybody know what I’m talking about?), layout design,  cover choice, screening photos, finding a good printer, and sending copies and thank-you letters to writers and photographers. A totally one-person production.

Oh, yes. I learned a lot. And they were as clean as I could make them.

Copyediting and Proofreading

So copyediting and proofreading your manuscript, whether fiction or non-fiction, makes the editor you send it to much happier.

There’s a difference between copyediting and proofreading, though they overlap. Mainly, copyediting is done on the manuscript before it is set in type. Proofreading is done on the final design and typesetting. Copyediting looks at sentence structure, grammar, paragraphing, sometimes choice of words, accuracy of facts, things like that. Including how the publisher wants to have your manuscript set up and submitted. You’ve seen words like to, two, or too, they’re or their, you’re or your used incorrectly over and over again. If you see them when you’re reading, you will do well when you copyedit your own material.

Apostrophes

Pay special attention to apostrophes.  I edited a newspaper for a while where the typesetter thought every plural needed an apostrophe: two horse’s, blue ribbon’s. Hmm.

My word processor underlines every “its,” indicating an error. It doesn’t underline “it’s.” Be sure to think it through every time. It’s is a contraction. The apostrophe means there’s a letter left out, as in wasn’t or couldn’t. If you mean “it is”, then “it’s” is proper, as in “It’s my dog.” If it is implying a possession, then “its” is the right one, as in “Its name is Buddy.”  A little strange because most possessives need an apostrophe: The Smith’s house, meaning the house of Smith, or Richard’s dog.

A less-than-perfect copyeditor once incorrectly changed my its to it’s in one of my articles. The same article was about horses, and s/he changed cavalry to Calvary. Hmm.

Quote marks and Periods

Strunk and White (remember them?) and the Chicago Manual of Style say to put commas and periods inside quote marks every time, but question marks and exclamation marks can go outside, depending on the quotation within the sentence. I feel sure it was because of the automatic spacing of a typewriter with the old courier font. Every letter and punctuation mark took the same amount of space. Periods and commas were so small they got lost from the sentence. That’s why we were taught to put two spaces after sentences, too.

The proportional spacing and kerning of today’s typesetting makes that reason no longer valid, but tradition carries on. The British, however, put the period inside the quote marks if it is part of the quote, but outside the quote marks if it is not. Makes more sense to me, and if I have editorial control, I use the British style. (FWA does it the American way, and I followed their style; otherwise I would have typed “it’s.” at the end of the first sentence three paragraphs above as “it’s”.)

Proofreading

Proofreading takes a different mindset from copyediting. It is done with your print-ready book pages in your hand — the last thing done to your book before printing. It’s the last chance to catch a typo, a comma where there should be a period, a double-space, a lost punctuation mark, a word improperly hyphenated, a paragraph indent forgotten. It includes looking at the captions under the photos, the page-number headings, the spacing of the chapter titles, italics and bold fonts – every little thing!

Most words you can see at a glance are correctly (or incorrectly) spelled, but you do need to – not just look at every word – but often closely at every word, sometimes every letter. Much of the material I worked with required botanical names for plants. You think my word-speller knew how to spell them? Nuh-uh. During both copyediting and proofing, I read every letter with my finger under the word in my trusty botanical book.

It takes some practice to copyedit your own work and proofread well, but you can certainly get a good head start with your editors if you send ‘em clean copy. When my most recent book was ready for proofing, the publisher wanted me to hire a proofreader, but I refused, because I knew I was capable of doing it myself.

You can, too.