Tagged: editing

  1. Editing terms

    In the market for an editor? If you’ve done any kind of shopping around you’ve probably seen estimates for different kinds of editorial services, which can be confusing if you’re not familiar with the terms. Here’s a quick run-down of different kinds of editing.

    Proofreading
    Proofreading is the most basic kind of editing and is typically done just prior to publication (on- or offline). When an editor is proofreading they’re just looking for blatant errors—a random period here, a lower-case proper noun there—really obvious mistakes that a user would probably notice at a glance.

    Copyediting (light and heavy)
    Copyediting is more involved than proofreading. To copyedit is to dig into the language and logic of a text and work some degree of editorial magic to make it as flawless as possible. The mistakes an editor catches at this level can be obvious, but many of them are subtle and require an understanding of English’s nuances to catch. They can also be matters of style—the AP Stylebook has a different rule for state abbreviations than the Chicago Manual of Style, for instance, so a copyeditor would be on the lookout for places where a text deviates from a given style and make it conform.

    It’s all a matter of degree, though. In a “light” copyedit, an editor will proceed gently, looking mostly for surface issues and not interfering too much with tone or voice. In a “heavy” copyedit they’ll dive right in and move sentences or entire paragraphs to improve readability. They’ll also eliminate wordiness, improve the overall flow, check facts, and flag any ambiguous or misleading statements. For clients that are struggling to communicate their brand or really engage customers, we would recommend a heavy copyedit. For clients who just want to strengthen their text and make sure it’s correct, we’d recommend a light copyedit.

    Content development (or “content editing” or “substantive editing”)
    This is basically a super-heavy copyedit. At this level of editing, an editor is working with very rough, incomplete, or disorganized text and doing a complete overhaul, often rewriting much of the text and changing or elevating the tone in the process. Content development is mostly associated with traditional publishing, however (if a book is in rough shape, it needs content development, but if a website is rough, it needs to be rewritten). When we do work above-and-beyond a heavy edit, we consider it “copywriting” because we’re essentially rewriting the text.

    Just a little tidbit: the terms “proofreading” and “copyediting” aren’t as arbitrary as they seem. “Proofreading” comes from the practice of doing a final check for errors on “page proofs,” i.e., images of book pages before they go to print. “Copyediting” comes from the term “copy.” Newspapers in particular call their text “copy,” which seems counterintuitive as en editor because you’re editing original text, not copied text, but in the print world it’s text that’s meant to be reproduced in print so they call it “copy.” The very idea of “copy” doesn’t really apply in web editing, but the word “copyediting” will likely stick around.

    Posted by Jessica Swope, web editor for Business Bullpen. You can follow Jessica on Tumblr.

  2. Perfection.

    Perfection.

  3. The Price of Typos

    Interesting/scary.

    bibliofeminista:

    Before digital technology unsettled both the economics and the routines of book publishing, they explained, most publishers employed battalions of full-time copy editors and proofreaders to filter out an author’s mistakes. Now, they are gone.

    There is also “pressure to publish more books more quickly than ever,” an editor at a major publishing house explained. Many publishers now skip steps. “In the past, you really readied the book in several discrete stages,” Paul Elie, a senior editor at Farrar, Straus and Giroux, explained. “Manuscript, galley proofs, revised proofs, blue lines. You marked your changes at each stage, and then the compositor incorporated them and sent you the next stage. Now there are intermediate stages; authors will e-mail in ‘one last correction,’ or we’ll produce intermediate stages of proof — the text is fluid, in motion, and this leads to typos.”

    Authors, too, bear some blame for the typo explosion. As Geoff Shandler, the editor in chief of Little, Brown and Company, told me, “Use of the word processor has resulted in a substantial decline in author discipline and attention. Manuscripts are much longer than they were 25 years ago, much more casually assembled, and beyond spell check (and not even then; and of course it will miss typos if the word is a word) it is amazing how little review seems to have occurred before the text is sent to the editor. Seriously, you have no idea how sloppy some of these things are.”

    None of this is really news, but it is good to remember the importance of copyeditors.

  4. Your Super-Mini Guide to Super-Proper Tech Writing: Part 2

    When writing papers in high school and college, my objective was always this: how can I say what I want to say in as many words as humanly possible? I considered a flowery, digressive, somewhat vague and elusive sentence to be the very height of literary achievement and could never understand why my professors didn’t seem to feel the same. “Too wordy” showed up in the margins of many a paper. And with good reason.

    These days I’m all about economy: how can I say what I want or need to say in a way that’s succinct, to the point, and pithy? It’s a different way of approaching a sentence—seeing it as Miata for your thoughts instead of a steam train. As a general rule, whether it’s technical writing, creative writing, or business writing, it’s probably always good to be on the lookout for wordiness and be ready (and willing) to trim it when you spot it. Don’t know what to look for? This list, taken from The Yahoo! Style Guide might be a good place to start:

    a few of the —> a few
    a large number of —> many, most
    a large part of —> many,most
    a large proportion of —> many, most
    a lot of —> many
    a number of—> some, many
    according to our data—> we find
    accordingly —> therefore, so
    after the conclusion —> after
    ahead of schedule —> early
    all of the —> all, all the
    almost all —> most
    along the lines of —> like, similar to
    along with —> with
    any of the —> any
    arrive at a conclusion —> conclude
    as a consequence of —> because (of)
    as a result of —> because (of)
    as long as —> if
    at a time when —> when
    at the moment —> now

    Read More

  5. Forget what your English teacher told you (some of it, anyway)

    Since I decided to become an editor several years ago and started taking seriously the rules of grammar that I’d always taken for granted, I’ve made it a point not to be that person. You know that person: the one that thinks other people actually, secretly, somewhere deep down in their hearts want to be corrected on their use of “I” versus “me”—the one that interjects things like “it’s not ‘myriad of’; it’s just ‘myriad.’ The ‘of’ is redundant” into conversation. No one wants to hang out with that person—least of all me.

    Read More