Your Own Copyediting: A How-To Guide
I’m a horrendously bad copyeditor who’s had to learn to be–if not a good, then at least a passable one, because keeping a copyeditor around for us is like finding someone to teach Defense Against The Dark Arts. So in case you’re in the same boat as I’ve found myself in before, right now, or you just plain can’t afford to spend an extra thousand dollars on your manuscript, I’m going to share my brilliant tactics for how to fake competence in what can be an extremely tedious and enervating subject.
Read aloud. Read your manuscript aloud to yourself. Don’t mumble. Read it like you’re reading it to another person. I read to my dog. This, more than anything else you can do, is going to help you focus–really focus–on every single word. No matter how many times you’ve read something eyes-only, read it aloud and you will spot something you’ve missed.
Complete at least two passes. Ideally, one for “natural reading”-type mistakes, the same things your reader will pick up as he reads along, and then a second time, line by line, paying attention not so much to the overall flow but to the mechanics of each sentence.
Remember why you’re doing this. Now is not the time to dwell on, for example, the higher order concept of hyphenation. Your goal isn’t to hyphenate every single word that could be hyphenated but, rather, to create a document that’s easy and pleasant to read. That doesn’t, through spelling and grammatical errors, take the reader out of the story. No one is going to read this book going, wow, you could’ve hyphenated that and didn’t. But they will notice if your book has ceased to be about telling a story and has become, at some point, a decorative exercise. Punctuation is not decoration; it’s utilitarian, and that’s all.
There are, of course, other tips and tricks you can use. But these three are the most important; because they’re not so much tips and tricks as guiding principles. I adopt a utilitarian approach to all of my editing (you can read more about that here), and I maintain that the most vital thing is to “remember why you’re doing it and remember, too, that good editing is functional editing. It’s not about honoring your own personal esthetic so much, or navel gazing about what that esthetic is, but producing a book that’s functional to its purpose: entertaining people.” The single most important thing you can do, when copyediting, is to not lose sight of that fact. Once you’re at the point where you are copyediting, substantive changes should no longer be made. If, in rereading your manuscript, you start thinking that this line could be different or that word could be changed, then you are not ready for copyediting.
This is polish time: spelling errors. Punctuation errors. Things like misspelled words and double commas. Trying to do both copy and substantive editing at the same time is going to mean giving neither aspect of improving your manuscript the attention it deserves.
