You’re being published and you know you’re going to be copyedited. And you’re dreading it. You know your text is just as you want it to be, so you definitely don’t want a stranger coming in and messing it up.
I can’t speak to what bad copyeditors might get up to – untrained ones, people who hold good and bad English immutable, people who think in terms of good and bad English – but here’s how a good copyeditor will handle your pride and joy.
Fear #1 – copyeditors will rewrite the text
A copyeditor isn’t a copywriter. A good copyeditor knows whose name is on the cover, and they know it’s not theirs.
Author’s voice is an important concept in editing. It’s your book (or article, or whatever – let’s call it all ‘book’ for ease). I’m not interested in making it mine – I’m not being paid to spend nearly enough time on it to do that! But I am interested in making your book shine.
In my world of scholarly humanities and social sciences, that means spending up to half the editing time on the mechanics – references, contents pages, figures and tables, captions, notes… the scholarly apparatus. My aim is to make the book work as a book, to avoid reader doubt, confusion and frustration. It’s basic quality control.
The other half of the time, I’m reading the text and tweaking. A lot of that tweaking is simply making the text conform to the house style. That’s the publisher’s own rules on whether we have single or double quotation marks, whether numbers are spelled out to ninety-nine, a hundred, nine or ten, and whether it’s 10% or 10 per cent.
I’ll be sorting out the capitalisation of headings, adding numbering to headings, or removing it, and making consequent changes – if there’s no section numbering allowed, your cross-reference to section 3 is meaningless and I’ll need to make a change to help the reader.
I’ll be moving strings of parenthetical citations into the publisher’s required order – ascending chronological, descending chronological, alphabetical – or leaving them as I find them, if the publisher doesn’t have a ruling on this. The publisher may want ‘among’ every time, rather than ‘amongst’, or ‘First World War’ not World War I.
Publishers usually have a rule about how long a quotation must be before it can be ‘displayed’ – set off from the rest of the text by indents and spacing. Quotations that are too short will go back into the main text (run on); if I find a longer quotation in the text, I’ll display it, though I have been known to make the occasional exception to such a rule if I think the text needs it.
Typos or inconsistent spellings (e.g. focused/focussed) will be straightened out. If you’ve written in UK English, and the book uses US English, then spellings and punctuation, and occasionally vocabulary (e.g. cell vs mobile, for phones), will be amended to conform to the style demanded by the publisher.
So yes, your text will change, but it’s not rewritten. How much it changes depends on how closely you abided by the publisher’s style guide when you were writing. Nothing here touches your ideas, nor your presentation of them. The words, and the order in which you lined them up, are fine and eminently recognisable.
If you’d followed the style guide completely when you wrote your text, you’d have written the text as it now stands, allowing for the editor having fixed genuine goofs.
Small infelicities will be amended (like correcting principal/principle when you’ve used the wrong one), silently – which means that they won’t be the subject of an author query (AQ).
Everything else – clarification of unclear writing, text that appears to contradict itself, problems with numbers or with the logic, unattributed quotations – will all become AQs for you to resolve.
Fear #2 – copyeditors won’t rewrite the text
Sometimes a publisher hires me to do a language edit. This is when the author’s command of English isn’t all it might be – perhaps it’s not their primary language, perhaps the author is a subject expert but a novice writer.
In this case, I’ll be more interventionist, smoothing out idioms and untangling convoluted sentences. If an author’s primary language is one that doesn’t have definite and indefinite articles, I may have to insert or move around ‘the’ and ‘a’ a lot.
Depending on the intended audience, I may be required to simplify the English – preferring simpler words to puffed-up ones, excising phrases that are just filler. My personal preference is for English that isn’t pared down to the bone. If the facts come hard and fast, it’s hard to take them in. We need a bit of breathing room.
But if the author has written mostly hot air, then the flowery phrases may have to go so that the facts aren’t a needle in a haystack, but are easily found and digested (well, hellooooo, mixed metaphor!).
Fear #3 – copyeditors will let me embarrass myself
Books stick around for a loooong time. You don’t want bloopers in print and online for ever! Everyone makes bloopers.
A good copyeditor will do some very basic fact-checking. If you say the Battle of Hastings was in 1096, your editor should fix that. If you attribute an idea to the wrong philosopher, your editor shouldn’t be expected to know that, nor if you misinterpret that idea. But you may get lucky and your editor is a subject specialist in just that part of your field.
If your book is full of difficult-to-spell names, or names that change according to context (typical in books about mediaeval history, for instance, where you may get the modern version of a name, its Latin equivalent and the original name in the local language), your copyeditor should be checking those, standardising some spellings to the ones you use most often, or raising AQs for where there’s a lot of flip-flopping.
I had one book to edit that included a chapter about a film I’d seen a while back. So when the author showed the famous poster for the movie and attributed it to the wrong scene, I felt something was off. I rewatched the movie and found that I had indeed remembered right. So I was able to highlight the error and invite the author to redraft that bit. She was, as you might imagine, very grateful! But she would have been wrong to rely on me knowing that. Fortunately, I liked that movie and didn’t mind spending my own time watching it again!
Publishers don’t, in my experience, put a lot of effort into appointing subject specialists to edit particular books. They may well make more of an effort for textbooks, but my last few edits have been Shakespeare, economic geography, drones, blockchain and legal rhetoric and that’s entirely typical.
The author really is meant to know what they’re writing about, and they retain that responsibility throughout. At root, edits are suggestions – though for some things they might be rather forceful suggestions, when it comes to house style!
The edit itself will remove things that might cause embarrassment if they made it into print. The number of times I had to put the second Z into Condoleezza Rice’s name!! And the second N into ‘millennium’!
Fear #4 – copyeditors will take over
The copyeditor represents the reader. They want the reader to stay in the text and not be distracted by silly little gaffes, misspellings and inconsistencies. They add a shine to the book by polishing up the mechanics, and ironing out the wrinkles – sometimes by themselves, if it’s obvious what the fix is, and sometimes by alerting you, the author, to make a correction.
Your ideas. Your voice. Your words. Just swept clean and buffed up. I’ve got your back.
And if I’m not the editor for you, then there are hundreds of great editors in the Chartered Institute of Editing and Proofreading’s Directory of Editorial Services.
