That’s the substantive and/or developmental editing done, time to start copyediting.

Fine-Tuning Your Work

Copyediting is often called line editing and attention is focused at sentence-level. This means grammar, punctuation, spelling, and so on. Sentences may be rewritten and unnecessary words removed. Where needed, passive verbs are replaced with active verbs and transitions may be included between paragraphs.

Style may also come under attention here; some people can't help but write in a formal tone when what they really need is a casual tone. You can often spot where this needs to be changed by reading your work aloud.

Another thing that is checked is consistency – capitalization, numbers (written or numerals) and hyphenation. If your writing has lists, these are checked to make sure they are structured the same.

Copy-editing is not really the bigger picture; instead, a metaphorical microscope is used to examine your work. The process can be broken down into heavy copyediting, medium, and light. Heavy copyediting tends to share blurry lines with substantive editing and can lead to complete sentences being rewritten.

It could also mean working with a writer who isn’t fluent in the English language; it might be amazing in content terms but needs rewriting and reorganizing to have it make sense.

With light copyediting, there isn’t a great need for improvement; perhaps a few words are removed, punctuation or grammar in places needs correction or a couple of sentences need rejigging to get them right. A writer may request this type of copyediting, whether there are serious issues with the work or not. If that’s the case, the only errors corrected are those that really stand out. And, of course, medium copyediting is somewhere between the two.

Drill it Down – Proofreading

Now we need to sharpen the focus on that microscope.

It really doesn’t matter what skill level the copyeditor is at; proofreading is a totally different concept and needs a different focus. A copyeditor may be a first-class proofreader but the two must be separated and done as two different tasks. A copyeditor cannot proofread while copyediting a manuscript, and vice versa.

The same applies to a writer who is doing all the work themselves. If you are focused on style and grammar, that missing punctuation or space won’t register. Think of it as separating your brain – one half is used for the writing and copyediting processes and the other half for the proofreading.

There are two very easy ways to remember what the proofreading process is about:

Proofreading is the process of proving that the manuscript is ready for publishing. Everything should have been done by this stage.

Proofreading is all about small changes, not the major ones.

Proofreaders scrutinize a manuscript for tiny errors; missed spelling errors, extra spaces, missed spaces, margin consistency, fonts and so on.

If a proofreader discovers any errors that are clearly copyediting errors, they shouldn’t go ahead and make any changes. Instead, the manuscript should be referred to the copyeditor, if one has been employed.

And breathe; in the final part, we’ll look at how proofreading and copyediting can also blur into one another.