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On the most basic level, professional-grade copyediting entails making certain that everything on a page ends up spelled properly.
Copyediting also involves shaking loose and rearranging punctuation—I
Two women are seated side by side at a posh dinner party, one a matron of the sort played in the old Marx Brothers movies by Margaret Dumont, except frostier, the other an easygoing southern gal, let’s say, for the sake of the visuals, wearing a very pink and very ruffled evening gown. Southern Gal, amiably, to Frosty Matron: So where y’all from? Frosty Matron, no doubt giving Southern Gal a once-over through a lorgnette: I’m from a place where people don’t end their sentences with prepositions. Southern Gal, sweetly, after a moment’s consideration: OK. So where y’all from, bitch?
Active Voice: The clown terrified the children. Passive Voice: The children were terrified by the clown. In a sentence written in the passive voice, the thing that is acted upon is frontloaded, and the thing doing the acting comes at the end.
IF WORDS ARE THE FLESH, MUSCLE, AND BONE OF PROSE, punctuation is the breath.
“Patriotism is, fundamentally, a conviction that a particular country is the best in the world because you were born in it,”
You’d be surprised at how many lists of twelve things contain only eleven things.
If you want readers to skip over a great big swath of your writing, set it in italics,
rings
Should be singular
where voice—eccentric, particular, peculiar as it may be—is paramount;
Damn right
“Try to preserve an author’s style if he is an author and has a style.” That’s an editorial maxim from The New Yorker’s*24 Wolcott Gibbs
the role of a copy editor is, above all else, to assist and enhance and advise rather than to correct—indeed, not to try to transform a book into the copy editor’s notion of what a good book should be but, simply and with some measure of humility, to help fulfill an author’s vision and make each book into the ideal version of itself.
the eleventh edition of Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary
Google Books Ngram Viewer,
THE PICTURE OF DORIAN GRAY
knots per hour One knot = one nautical mile per hour.
Unless accelerating, then it is correct
career perjurers rabidly eager to condemn as fabrications facts they find inconvenient—I
