Castle Walls Editing

Tag: proofreading

  • Training and Its Many Benefits

    Training and Its Many Benefits

    Professional associations such as the Editorial Freelancers Association (EFA) and ACES: The Society for Editing offer many resources that help editors excel in their work and run successful businesses.

    I particularly appreciate the access to quality training provided by these organizations, which offer courses at discounted fees to members. 

    Courses are generally either learn-at-your-own-pace (where you’re given access to the materials for a set period, typically six months) or instructor led (in which instructors deliver training materials each week for a designated stretch, providing students with weekly feedback on graded assignments).

    The EFA and ACES have also made free webinars available to members during the pandemic.

    The benefits of training are many:

    • Refresh your knowledge
    • Stay current with trends in the profession
    • Expand your editorial offerings
    • Get feedback from world-class professionals
    • Meet other editing professionals
    • Reinvigorate your enthusiasm for the profession
    • Fill gaps in your schedule in a positive way 

     

    Refresh your knowledge

    Most editing skills are picked up through hard-earned experience, and basic courses may seem below your current skill level. But even 101-type courses can fill a gap in your knowledge or cause you to rethink an aspect of your editing business.

    Stay current with trends in the profession

    Language is always changing, along with electronic tools, editing trends, and publisher requirements. Continued training keeps you current and enables you to incorporate new tools and fine-tune your processes.

    Expand your editorial offerings

    Proofreading is very different from copy editing, and copy editing is different from line editing, and line editing is different from developmental editing. Training lets you get your feet wet in new areas under the guidance of a seasoned professional.

    Get feedback from world-class professionals

    Your instructors are generally respected members of the editing community (and in my experience they care deeply both about the profession and about helping others). Learning from the best is never a bad idea.

    Meet other editing professionals

    Most classes contain forums where you can meet your classmates and learn from those at all levels. The editing community is wide and welcoming, and the fellow editors you meet will prove invaluable for sharing both knowledge and work opportunities.

    Reinvigorate your enthusiasm for the profession

    Learning something new almost always fires you with enthusiasm for putting your knowledge into practice. It’s easy to get caught up in the grind of job after job, and stepping back for a moment can remind you of what you love about editing.

    Fill gaps in your schedule in a positive way 

    For those running their own businesses, any downtime between jobs can feel like lost time and fill you with anxiety. Though there is never a shortage of marketing, accounting, or other nonediting work to tackle, training is a particularly satisfying way to bridge gaps between jobs.

    The following is a selection of courses I’ve taken from my professional organizations (and from the amazing Jennifer Lawler):

    Copyediting: Beginning (EFA)

    Copyediting: Intermediate (EFA)

    Copyediting: Advanced (EFA)

    Developmental Editing of Fiction: Beginning (EFA)

    Developmental Editing of Fiction: Intermediate (EFA)

    Developmental Editing of Mystery, Thriller, Suspense (Jennifer Lawler)

    Editing the Romance (Jennifer Lawler)

    Essentials of Conflict (Jennifer Lawler)

    Truby’s Masters Studio: Horror, Sci-Fi, and Fantasy (Audio)

    How to Edit Marketing Materials with Savvy and Sense (ACES/Poynter)

    The Art and Science of Editing (ACES/Poynter)

    The Web’s Best Editing Resources (ACES/Poynter)

    Language Primer: Basics of Grammar, Punctuation and Word Use (ACES/Poynter)

    Writing Online Headlines: SEO and Beyond (ACES/Poynter)

    Getting It Right: Accuracy and Verification in the Digital Age (ACES/Poynter)

    Fundamentals of Editing (ACES/Poynter)

    Clarity Is Key: Making Writing Clean and Concise (ACES/Poynter)

  • When I Pay an Editor, What Am I Paying For?

    When I Pay an Editor, What Am I Paying For?

    Paying a professional to edit a manuscript is often pricier than writers might imagine, and the cost can be all the more difficult because authors often have to work the expense into a budget (or a family budget) with no guarantee of a monetary return on their investment.

    If you’re here, then you are probably already convinced that editing is an important, even essential, part of producing a manuscript for your audience. But before deciding to make that investment, it’s also important to understand (and be able to explain to loved ones) just what you’re paying for.

    The Time It Takes to Edit

    For authors, the real eye-opener about editing might be the sheer number of hours that the editor will spend working on their manuscript.

    Many authors might even think that all editing is, in essence, proofreading. But from developmental editing down to proofreading, the time requirements and the amount of work required per page varies for all the different levels of editing.

    At the proofreading stage, for example, the manuscript has (presumably) already been through the copyediting stage, and the proofreader is only looking for typos, wayward design elements, and anything missed (or introduced) during previous stages. So a proofreader would be able to look at more pages per hour than, say, the copyeditor.

    For copyediting, during which an editor checks for spelling, grammar, punctuation, style, continuity, and consistency, an editor generally edits at a rate of six to ten pages per hour.

    So if you have a 400-page manuscript, that’s at least forty hours of work, and that only accounts for one pass through the document, albeit the pass that accounts for most of the expense.

    I like to do an initial read-only pass to familiarize myself with the work, then the copyediting pass, and then a final pass to catch anything I might have missed or any errors I might have introduced while inputting edits.

    More Than Spell-Check

    Writers also might not realize just how much an editor delivers. It’s easy to imagine that the editor will do a simple read-through, mark a few spelling issues or misplaced commas, and then be on his or her way. But the benefits to the manuscript go far beyond.

    In addition to checks for grammar, spelling, usage, and consistency, a copyeditor provides (or should provide) a style sheet noting character names and all word uses that vary from Merriam-Webster or the Chicago Manual of Style or whatever other dictionary and style guide the editor is following.

    With my style guide, I also include a timeline and breakdown of character and location details on the style sheet (so you don’t have a character with blue eyes on page ten and green eyes two hundred pages later). You can also learn more about style sheets here.

    Authors are generally surprised by all the help provided during a copyedit—and they are generally very appreciative as well. The author’s job is to tell a great story, and if an editor can help put that story before an audience in its best possible light, then all the better for the author, the reader, and the work itself.

    The Five E’s

    With a good editor, you get an invisible partner dedicated to your success and to the success of your work. You get someone to pore over your beloved manuscript word by word and help push it to its best possible form.

    An editor lets readers dissolve into your story without any technical details breaking the spell. You never want to give your reader an excuse to stop reading, and an editor helps ensure that doesn’t happen.

    The following are five e’s that an editor provides:

    • Expertise
    • Experience
    • Equipment & Resources
    • Effort
    • Élan

     

    Expertise

    Quite simply, editors should know things that authors don’t about word usage and about formatting a manuscript and about the editing process. That’s part of why you’re paying them! Editors should also display expertise with the tools at their disposal. The author’s job is to tell a great story, and the editor can help by having expert knowledge of Word and macros and wild-card searches and editing software.

    Editors should also have expert knowledge of the various style and usage guides, and editors should keep abreast of language trends and shifting styles. Editors should also display a level of expertise that empowers them to know when and when not to break style (it doesn’t help your manuscript to have an editor who inflexibly applies a “rule” no matter the context).

    Experience

    I’ve been editing for more than twenty years and have learned a lot over that time—including that I didn’t know as much as I thought I did twenty years ago!

    When you pay for an editor, one of the things you’re paying for is the benefit of that editor’s experience, whether it’s two years or twenty years or forty years. Part of the magic of editing is that editors are always learning, and editors take great joy in passing these lessons on to their clients.

    Equipment & Resources

    Editors have to maintain equipment and software. I like to use a multi-monitor setup, which I find increases productivity and allows me to have the page I’m editing displayed at a good size in portrait view on a revolving monitor, while my style sheet is open on a second monitor (I also have my Chromebook open for additional resources).

    I edit primarily in Word and use the software packages and macros from PerfectIt and the Editorium to increase productivity and help with formatting and consistency issues. These tools save time and allow me to focus more on the sentence structure and word usage and the real mind work of editing.

    The less time I spend on tasks that can be automated with a macro or piece of software, the more efficient I am and the more bang you get for your buck.

    Writers should also expect editors to have a library of resources and to be familiar with them. Editors should have an expert working knowledge of and access to style manuals such as the Chicago Manual of Style and the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association, the major dictionaries, and such language resources as Garner’s Modern English Usage and Fowler’s Dictionary of Modern English Usage.

    Effort

    Editing requires long periods of concentration as editors pore over a work page by page, paragraph by paragraph, word by word, and letter by letter. This is the real work of editing, and it can’t be rushed. It’s not that someone can’t deliver a well-edited manuscript for a dollar a page, but when you look at the time it takes to edit something properly and the hourly rate that this equates to, you have to wonder if an editor editing at an extremely low pay rate isn’t rushing through the work.

    There is nothing that editors value more than good clients they want to work with again and again. My goal is to deliver the best possible job to my clients so that they want to use me again and refer me to their associates. There are no shortcuts for making this happen. It’s all about hard work.  

    Élan

    This is a bit harder to quantify, and I suppose an editor could have a poor attitude toward his work and still do a good job, but it seems far-fetched. Passion and enthusiasm for editing is what keeps an editor from rushing through the work, and this passion adds unlimited value in any number of different ways.

    Editors get paid for their work, but the rewards of editing also lie in helping authors produce manuscripts that are sent out into the world and are enjoyed by readers, whether that entails the countless readers for a bestseller or a handful of readers for a passion project with a more limited release.

     

    Let’s Get Started

    For more information about how Castle Walls Editing can help you with your manuscript, contact us here.

  • 5 Signs an Editor Has Been at Work

    Sometimes I’ll be reading happily along and find myself tipping my cap to another editor for the care taken with a particular usage. For just a moment, that editor is there, ghostlike, almost visible through the page.

    You don’t need an EMF meter or full-spectrum camera to spot an editor, nor do you have to worry about ectoplasm on your favorite book. The following are five signs an editor has been at work.

    1. En dashes

    Most people don’t know an en dash from a haberdashery. The mark is most often used in number ranges (1971–2017) and when connecting an open compound to another modifier (Pulitzer Prize–winning author). Many would like to exorcise them from use, but I have a real fondness for en dashes.

    2. Capping aunt and uncle

    People understand writing “I love Aunt Janice and Uncle Bill” but often look askance when seeing something like “I love my aunt Janice and my uncle Bill.” Most likely a copy editor took down the a and u. (Capping of mother and father also causes confusion, though not quite as much.)

    3. Apostrophes with abbreviated words

    Love ’em or leave ’em. When letters are left out at the beginning of a word, the letters are replaced with an apostrophe, not an opening single quote. Some simply don’t know this, and some don’t take the time to fix it. I’ve seen the wrong quote there so often I have to smile when I see the apostrophe.

    4. Plural possessives

    Speaking of apostrophes, there’s probably nothing that trips up your average citizen more than possessives, especially plural ones, especially when they involve names. If I had a nickel for every time I saw something like “the Smith’s house” when referring to a family of Smiths—and not to that one Smith everyone knows as such . . .

    5. Comprise

    Traditionally, the whole comprises the parts and “is comprised of” has been considered poor usage. Whether or not you care about this usage anymore, an editor has likely laid his cold, spectral hand on the text if it’s used in the “correct” way.

  • Talk About Bleary Eyes

    While attending the George Washington University, I picked up extra scratch by proofreading patents for a law firm. Back in the early nineties, twelve dollars an hour seemed like a lot of money (though, being a college student, the firm might as well have sent my checks directly to the M Street bars).

    The gig entailed traditional proofreading, not the popularly held catch-all sense that can seemingly mean almost any kind of copy editing. The job was to proof already-printed patents against documents the law firm submitted to the Patent and Trademark Office (PTO). I worked as part of a two-person team, taking turns reading the office copy while the other proofreader followed along in the printed patent. (In practice, I followed along about 90 percent of the time. Yes, I had the more difficult task, and no, I didn’t make a cent more for my efforts!)

    If the patent had already been printed, you might wonder about the point of proofing it. Would the patent be reprinted? No, but if the clients, who were billed for our services, thought the change important enough, an errata sheet could be filed with the PTO and permanently attached to the patent.

    Lest you’re thinking, “Wow, you must have gotten a sneak peek at some crazy-cool inventions!,” I can assure you that wasn’t the case. These were chemical and electrical patents detailing processes for such things as substrate application for computer chips. The patents were highly technical, and their proofreading often involved the reading of long chemical strings and formulas, along with such text features as superscripts and subscripts.

    Wait a minute. This was college. Shouldn’t I have been out kidnapping the rival school’s goat?

    The work had to be done in the law firm because the firm, for obvious reasons, wouldn’t allow client files to leave the office. So my partner and I would steal into the office at odd hours (usually Saturday or Sunday mornings), grab the files, and find an empty conference room to spend the next six or so hours performing the incredibly tedious work.

    And the work was tedious, but I credit it for helping me develop the mental muscles that allow me to concentrate for long periods of time. It’s common for people to see an error in text and say, “How could an editor miss this?” But that question presumes that the editor has had that bit of text and only that bit of text laid before him or her, when these instances are usually missed not because editors aren’t capable of picking up a specific error, but because of a lapse of concentration during the course of a long day of editing.

    This is why frequent breaks are so important. When reading text, the mental red flags that go up when something is amiss might very well not be raised if the editor is fatigued. If tired, editors can easily read right over something that would jump out at them if they were fresher.

    I can now look at all the work I did proofreading patents as training for my editing career, but I suppose the training would only have done so much good if I didn’t love the work as well. Even when proofing materials that were largely impenetrable to me, I loved finding errors, and while some patents were fairly clean, any problem that could go wrong at some point inevitably did. Missing lines or even pages of text. Words run together. Even an innocently introduced case of profanity. (Yes, I once caught the f-word in a patent.)

    One of the fun parts of the job was that, because we did off-hours work, almost no one at the firm knew who we were. We felt a bit like secret agents Mission: Impossible–ing our way into the office, knocking out our work, and getting the hell out of Dodge.

    Or maybe that makes it sound a bit cooler than it actually was. Maybe you wouldn’t think there was much cool about a job that involved making sure every little syllable was correct in a word like dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane. But I enjoyed it, and in many ways I miss the job that I will forever associate with a particular time in my life.

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