March 25th, 2019

Copyediting for writers

I got so into writing about copyediting in my post from last summer about when you shouldn’t do it (basically anytime you’re not asked)–which not everyone agreed with, but I enjoyed talking about it. So much so that I wanted to do another post on this topic, a less inflammatory one about what level of copyediting writers should attempt with their own work if they do in fact wish to share it with others (thus an exception from the “nobody asked you” rule–you can always ask yourself, but when should you bother?)

For the purposes of this post–and reality in general–I’m taking copyediting to mean reading text through thoroughly to spot errors in spelling, grammar, and punctuation, as well as inconsistencies in both style and content (colour versus color but also her eyes were blue and now they’re green) and infelicities like awkward phrasing. People often say proofreading when they talk about a straight read for errors, but that term has a very specific meaning in publishing so better to avoid.

I find writers get fed a couple untruths at two extremes–either they get told they don’t need to worry about copyediting their own work because that’s what workshop groups/editors/publishers–so it’s basically everyone else’s problem and we don’t need to try! Or they get told they need to make sure their manuscript is copyedited on a professional level and they make themselves hysterical about every period, because one tiny typo spells doom. Neither of these are true. Here’s a rough guideline to what level of copyediting your work might need when you submit it to a publisher or agent….

First off, every submission we send out should be subject to the same two steps we should be doing with every fragment and email we inflict on other humans–spell checker, careful read through. This should be a read for sentence-level errors only–as soon as you start making substantive changes, you can introduce other errors and the copyediting pass basically needs to start over. Do ALL your major edits, reassure yourself that the manuscript is basically solid, then come back once more and look for typos, bad grammar, repeated words or phrases, parts where you started editing the sentence but didn’t finish (mismatched tenses or pronouns come up all the time in edited work), wrong words/homonyms (assess vs asses, anyone?), and things on that level. it’s also fine that a writer is a not a professional copyeditor and if you don’t know exactly what a split infinitive is but this sentence makes sense for the characters, that’s cool. Think about how a reader will encounter the text and try to make it easy for them–don’t worry about perfection, because there is indeed someone else whose job it is to do that.

On one level this read should be easy, because you’re done writing the book now, and you’re only fixing stuff you know to be wrong, really cutting down on stressful judgement calls. On the other hand, you may know the material so well that it can be hard to see errors–you know what it should say that your eye just glides right over missing and wonky bits. If you know yourself to be a messy writer who often gets a tonne of copyediting level markup in workshop but you aren’t finding much, you may need to call in backup.

Yes, after all those writing teachers and workshoppers, you may need yet another helpful outsider to do an additional read. By the point you’ve written a full manuscript, you know yourself well as a writer–are you error-prone and do you spot your own errors easily? If yes and no, you really should borrow a set of eyes just so the manuscript doesn’t come across as messy or sloppy. If you are good at finding errors, you might be able to do it on your own. This is really a “know thyself” question.

If you have a fellow writer you can trade projects with, you can barter your services; OR you may have someone in your life who is good at this work (of course professional editors are good, but also teachers, often lawyers, and also many people who have unrelated careers and just love to nitpick) and who loves you enough to read a whole manuscript for free. Otherwise, if you don’t have anyone you can swap with and you are very worried about your inability to find problems in the ms, you might need to pay someone. I would say that’s really a last resort for copyediting though.

To be clear, the rumour going around that if a submitted manuscript contains even one teeny typo it will be immediately disqualified is false, but the ms should be quite clean–errors right at the beginning before the reader is immersed in the story, lots of errors, huge distracting errors, and especially errors that actually render meaning unclear are all going to cause problems. Basically, you never want the person who is supposed to love your book to stop reading and furrow their brow. So, if you forgot a comma somewhere, oh well, but if a character’s name keeps changing or there’s a word missing and now the sentence doesn’t make sense, you’re going to want someone to catch that.

Stuff not to worry about: Please don’t try to find out an individual publisher’s style rules and follow them–not only is that hard to do, you’ll have to re-edit the book for every submission. I would go so far as to say as anything that ressembles publisher’s style–like which numbers to spell out or whether is jewellery vs jewelry–is stuff you don’t need to worry about. If your ms is a little inconsistent on these fronts, no meaning is going to be obscured and whatever house that picks it up is definitely going to want to fix that stuff their own way.

And another thing: cover letters and query letters, résumés, proposals, marketing plans. These are brief professional documents designed to secure maximum attention and thus should be nearly perfect. Sorry. If there’s a tiny typo on your one-page summary, some editors/agents are going to be “well, we’re all only human” but others will get distracted or annoyed so better just assume the latter. Also, all of the materials I listed here are things most readers are just itching to discard–there’s always going to be more agent queries than opportunities for representation, more proposals than grants–so don’t give anyone a reason to discount you. Read it over closely, sleep on it, read it again. And these items are easy to ask someone to read for you, since they are so short. But still, buy them dinner in gratitude.