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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.

beginning copyediting for fiction

Tips for Editors & Writers

  • World-building without info-dumping

    World-building is often seen as the province of science fiction and fantasy writers who have to convey new-to-us settings and cultures, and occasionally by historical writers who have to convey the feel of an era that a reader may not know much about. But every story takes place somewhere. Even stories set in a contemporary…

    Read more…

  • 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…

    Read more…

  • 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,…

    Read more…

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how to become an editor

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