Apart from the knowledge that is in your head, hands and heart, there are some tools of the trade you’ll need to be a copy editor.
What editing is and isn’t (hint – it is not about someone taking a red pen to your work).
We all spend time writing things, every day. We just don’t think about it, until things go wrong.
Two style guides with which I have grappled: the Cape Times Style Book is the 1974 edition, while Do It In Style dates from 1995.
The Associated Press has cast a very big stone among the editing pigeons: they have changed their style and now say that “more than” and “over” can both be used to indicate a greater numerical value. This probably passed most of the world by, but in the editing world it is a very big deal (read more on that from the inimitable Grammar Girl).
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There are different kinds of editors, who do different things to text. Here’s a quick guide to the main ways something you write might be changed…
The world of the copy editor and proofreader is dense with detail, fraught with finickiness, complicated by comma rage.
The recent furore surrounding the publication of a hoax blog post at Huffington Post SA has had me thinking – about hate speech (which I wrote about here), and about the process by which decisions are made about publication or non-publication of a particular piece of writing. In years of experience at IOL, I had more unsolicited pieces of writing cross my email inbox than I care to think about now. Over time, I learned…
