Get Organized for Maximum Effect

There’s no such thing as a perfectly copyedited book. If you look hard enough, you’ll find that every book has its errors or things that could have been done better. Nobody’s perfect, after all. And while it’s right to aim for perfection in your copyediting, it’s actually more than good enough simply to correct the vast majority of mistakes and avoid glaring errors.

Your Computer

Success in copyediting – which means being accurate and consistent – is all about preparation. You need to do things systematically, not haphazardly. But being systematic doesn’t mean leaving everything up to your personal computer.

Your personal computer is a helpful tool for copyediting. But computers make mistakes. Don’t rely on it to do all your thinking for you. If you do, it could easily lead you into a lot of trouble.

For example, spellcheckers are a good tool and I use them. However, they are far from infallible: they suggest things that are often plain wrong or completely inappropriate. The reason is this: your spellchecker couldn’t care less about the meaning of your sentence.

All a spellchecker does is follow a set of rules. Those rules are inflexible and they take little account of context. Sometimes the rules it follows have been programmed incorrectly. That means you could follow your spellchecker’s recommendations and input hundreds of errors into your writing.

Spellcheckers’ suggested alternative spellings and constructions are frequently wrong or inappropriate. If you have a high personal language level, you’ll be using a lot of words it won’t even be able to recognize. If you left it to your spellchecker, these words would be changed to really stupid alternatives, and your sentences would become gobbledygook.

If you’re a writer of science fiction or horror, for instance, you may have invented new words for your story, or deliberately misspelled ordinary words. You won’t want those changed.

In addition, when you use your spellchecker you’ll need to know what version of English you want – UK English, US English, Australian English, Canadian English, Indian English …

All these things are easily forgotten when you’re sitting up late into the night going through your spellchecker’s comments, page after page. A yawning author drowning in coffee and a careless spellchecker are a fatal combination.

So use your computer to help you copyedit your work, but don’t trust it to find every mistake or solve every problem: it won’t.

Follow a List

It’s good to have a list of points you need to take care of when you copyedit. Whether you want to deal with these points a chapter at a time or wait to go through the whole book, it’s always helpful to have a list you can follow:

Don’t trust your memory. If you don’t write down what you need to do – if you try to keep everything in your head – you will go horribly wrong.

Keep the list by your side as you write; follow it when you copyedit. Make the points itemized on this list your own. One day, you’ll find you are taking care of most of them as you write, which will shorten the time it takes to copyedit afterwards.

If you make sensible, consistent decisions while you write, copyediting will take less time.

So keep the list at your side. Make notes if you wish. Decide what to do in advance of writing or as you write. Try not to leave every copyediting decision until after you have finished writing. Your ultimate goal will be to copyedit as you write. That won’t stifle your creativity – it will increase it.