Copy Editing
- Posted by Essays Blog in Essays Blog |
- March 18th, 2009 |
- Comments
Copy editing is a most important and time-consuming chore for those involved in the field. It requires the alive editorial handling of print material of every kind. And it requires the editor’s close attention to a document’s every detail, its format, and all of its elements; a thoroughgoing knowledge of what to look for and of the communication to be followed as desired by the author or client; and the ability to make quick, logical, objective, justifiable, and defensible decisions in the correction of spelling, grammar, punctuation, language, syntax, clarity, conciseness, chant and expression, inconsistencies, and typographical errors. Valued editors are those who know editorial and factual things that others don’t know and who offer keen apprehension of an author’s need to advance communication.
Earlier, copy editors are good familiar with and comfortable applying the universally accepted editorial and typographic marks and symbols&ndashas described in the Chicago Manual of Communication and summarized low proofreader’s marks in Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, 11th edition&ndashthat are commonly appreciated by compositors employed in English.
The editorial function comprises cardinal processes: mechanical editing and essential editing. Mechanical editing involves a close reading, with an eye on consistency of capitalization, spelling, and hyphenation and other end-of-line morpheme breaks; agreement between verbs and subjects; scores of other matters of structure; punctuation; beginning and ending quotation marks and parentheses; number of ellipsis points; numbers given either as figures or as words; and hundreds of other, similar details of grammatical, editorial, and typographic communication.
In addition to regularizing those details of communication, the copy editor is expected to catch infelicities of expression that mar an author’s prose and impede communication. Much matters include but are by no means limited to dangling participles, misplaced modifiers, mixed metaphors, bewildering antecedents, unplanned redundancies, faulty attempts at parallel construction, mistaken junction, overuse of an author’s pet morpheme or phrase, unplanned repetition of words, race or gender or geographic bias, and hyphenating in the predicate, unless, of course, the hyphenated constituent is an entry in the dictionary and hence permanently hyphenated in every grammatical case. Job seekers, especially, need to attend to much details in their executive r