You might be a copy editor if . . .
Our upcoming Beginning Copyediting for Fiction class will educate anyone wanting to fix the errors seen on a daily basis in the real world!
Over the past week or so, I’ve caught the following typos and grammatical awkwardness in major news media:
USA Today: “publically released”
USA Today: “could cause driver’s to crash”
USA Today: “exasperating the problem” (should be “exacerbating the problem”)
Yahoo Entertainment: “Affleck has three children with whom Lopez has become the stepmother to.”
People: “A college student is dead after falling to his death.”
CNN: “Crossed first paths”
ABC News: “preventing recruiters from meting with students”
If you, like me, have a tendency to spot errors like this, then you, too, are either a copy editor or could be one.
Tips for Editors & Writers
Focus on a limited number of problems in story development
Typically in a manuscript evaluation or developmental edit, I focus on what I perceive to be the three-to-five most important concerns I’ve noticed in the ms. This is the approach I teach my editing students. Editing too many problems at once overburdens the author In any given ms, there may be ten or fifteen developmental problems…
Clients who want services you don’t offer
Newer freelancers sometimes come to me in a panic because a client has approached them to do work that’s outside their typical scope. Commonly this is something like the freelancer offers copyediting and developmental editing but the client wants coaching. What should they do? They don’t know how to coach, they don’t offer coaching services,…
Expand into Book Doctoring and Ghostwriting
If you’ve been a developmental editor for any length of time, you’ve likely encountered an author who just wants you to write the book for them. Or, you’ve encountered a manuscript that was in such disrepair that it required a herculean effort to fix it, dropping your hourly rate down to pocket change. As a…
