I’m back for a new season of blog posts, and very happy about it! So let’s get stuck in with a look at the raison d’être for copyediting – improving the quality of the text.
Note – that’s not the quality of your thinking, of your research or of your ideas. Copyeditors are looking at the execution of writing it all up. Is it unambiguous, does it flow logically, does the scholarly apparatus actually work?
In my scholarly nonfiction world, half my time is spent on anything but the main text! References, figures, tables, captions, heading levels, contents pages, potted author biographies, fixing typing errors like double spaces, the wrong kind of quotation marks and all that gubbins. (For more detail, you might read my earlier posts What should a good copyeditor do?, Why does my publisher insist on a copyedit? What’s its value? and The 5 kinds of editing: I need a proofreader, right? What’s a copyeditor do?)
Once all that’s done, I can actually start to read the text.
But first, a quick definition. I’m old-school. To me, copyediting is the thing that comes between a developmental/structural edit, or peer review (ensuring you’ve included all of, and only, what you want to say, and set it out in a logical order) and the design, layout or typesetting (the technical end of preparing the file for publication).
In other words, once you know you’ve written down all you want to say, and deleted all the things you’ve changed your mind about, I arrive. I leave when the files are sent off to the typesetter/designer. That means I carry out quite a lot of what these days is being newly defined as ‘line editing’, looking at how you express yourself and whether it hangs together in terms of language usage and flow, once I’ve dealt with all the mechanics of making the book work as a book, or the article as an article, as described in the second paragraph.
Be aware that some editors define their line editing and copyediting services as two separate things.
What does better quality mean?
For the individual reader, better quality text means they can read for meaning without distraction. Scholarly readers will appreciate accurate and complete referencing, artwork that enhances the text rather than disagrees with it, and numbers that add up to what they’re supposed to. Ambiguity is swept away.
For the publishing house, better quality text means reputation: happier customers and better reviews, and the ability to take pride in their output.
For the author, better quality means job satisfaction and, crucially, a rather greater likelihood of being cited. We know that poor-quality text, however defined, results in fewer citations – confused, jargon-laden text fares particularly badly.
Right, after that diversion, let’s get back to where I start reading the text and seven of the ways my work improves the writing, and your impact.
1 Confusables
These little beasties are the words that tend to trip us up. I recently read a novel in which the solution ‘alluded’ the main character. Oh, no it didn’t! It ‘eluded’ them.
Then there are the usual suspects: principal/principle, licence/license, practice/practise, elicit/illicit, affect/effect, lent/leant and so on and so on and so on. I’ve noticed lately that people are starting to get overstated and understated back to front.
Confusing your confusables, so very easily done, hence the name, can yank your reader out of what you’re saying to tut, roll their eyes, mutter imprecations under their breath or otherwise stop paying the right kind of attention. And once you’ve seen one in a published book or article, you tend to be on the lookout for more.
Copyeditors are the folks who will mop these up for you, keeping the reader thinking about what you’re saying, not how you’re saying it.
2 Punctuation
Single or double quotation marks? Serial (Oxford) comma or not? Unspaced em or spaced en dashes? Or two (or even three) hyphens? Ellipses in square or round brackets, or sent naked into the world?
And that’s before copyeditors pay attention to whether there’s proper punctuation at the end of a sentence – so many full stops (full points, periods) go missing at the end of a paragraph, especially if that paragraph ends with something in parentheses, like a Harvard (author-date) citation.
Then there are those citations floating adrift in the text – coming after the punctuated end of once sentence and before the capital letter that kicks off the next one, belonging nowhere.
What about lists – notoriously tricky to decide how to punctuate – commas at the end of each item, or nothing at all, or semicolons? Capital letters at the start, or lowercase? Colon to introduce a list, or a full stop? Vary this by the length of each list item? How long is a short item, or how long is a long one?
Do you always avoid the breathless comma splices that squish into a single sentence things that should be separate, and make it hard to follow your argument? They’re such hard work to read because the reader now has to reconstruct your sentences to find the intended meaning.
Copyeditors are the folks who will set this all straight, allowing the punctuation to structure the sentence so there’s no confusion or ambiguity about your meaning, and no reader feeling they’ve got one over on you, the hapless author.
3 Grammar
As you revise and revise again, your basic grammar can start to fall apart – single/plural agreements no longer do (this happens all the time!); rejigging a sentence can mean a that should be a which, and vice versa. You may even end up leaving a verb in the wrong tense, or may take one out, meaning to replace it, and then forget to. But as you skim read your text for the umpteenth time, your brain will tell you it’s there.
You may – heaven forfend – even suffer a momentary lapse and leave something like ‘comprise of’ in your text. Your copyeditor has your back.
4 Usage
I’ve puzzled over what an author means until I’ve grumpily pulled up the dictionary for a fairly common word that of course I know the meaning of, only to find that if I go to the fifth meaning listed – perhaps the one marked ‘archaic’ – the sentence then makes sense. That’s unhelpful to your reader.
We all want your text to be engaging and stimulating, but if your over-reliance on the lower-ranked meaning of a word means that your text is now obscure rather than erudite, your friendly neighbourhood copyeditor will suggest a rephrasing for you to consider.
Some fields just invent words – I find this mostly in social sciences, where verbing nouns and nouning verbs is the order of the day. A lot of these coinages are perfectly OK in the context, even if they’ve not come into wide-enough use to find their way into dictionaries yet. Sometimes this habit of accreting bits onto words means I just slice away – successfulness becomes merely, but succinctly, success.
5 Text that goes clunk in the night…
Sometimes you just get stuck. It’s a while ago now, but one author was trying to convey that something was intractably tangled up, but had fixated on the simile of an onion. If this were true of an onion, that its layers were impossible to unravel, then I’m pretty sure we wouldn’t have onion rings on so many pub menus, and we wouldn’t call the layers ‘layers’ in the first place.
After playing with the idea of knotted-up embroidery, or even loose threads in a tapestry, the author conceded that I could just delete his simile altogether and say what he meant – and ‘intractable tangle’ won the day.
Sometimes you just get tangled up yourself, trying to be so totally precise that you just pile words upon words until the reader begs you to stop. A good copyeditor will whip out their sword and deal with your Gordian knot for you – or suggest a rewording.
In English we have the notion of ‘elegant variation’ – one of the advantages of a language that has helped itself so freely to words meaning similar things from multiple other languages. So it is clunky to keep repeating the identical word, although I’ve worked with one author for whom English was not a primary language who thought that rapid repetition of a word was a delightful joke.
In its place, it can be a useful tool for emphasis (I’ve done it twice in this article), but used too often, or too heavily? Clunk, clunk, clunk.
6 Embarrassing typos
These are the kinds of typos you don’t want to slip through: missing the L out of public, missing the F out of shift, missing the B out of the name Hornby, missing the O out of count… I’ve found and fixed all of these, some of them many times (the missing L from public is the most frequent – be warned!). There are many, many times when spellcheck won’t save you, but some of those times are much more embarrassing than others!
7 Adherence to the publisher’s style
When you’re writing for different journals and book publishers, internal documents for your institution or reports for a funder, it’s not really possible to be across all the nuances of the house style for each one.
It’s always worth checking the style a journal or book publisher uses for references, as you can then export your references list from your management software in the right format – or at least a very close approximation of it.
Your copyeditor will be able to spend a greater proportion of their time concentrating on the text itself rather than changing full stops to commas in a long references list, or cutting full forenames to initials, or changing SMITH to Smith, so it’s always worthwhile doing that.
In addition, your copyeditor will ensure that the correct style is applied to your text so that the publisher is content to proceed to publication. I’ve had authors who’ve had a good go at the style themselves, and it’s always a sign that I’m working with an author who cares about their writing and the end product.
Equally, I had one author give it a go and, having got hold of the wrong end of the stick, be beautifully consistent – consistently wrong!
Mostly, I have authors who have just written as they always do, happy for their copyeditor (hello!) to turn their text into the required style.
