Tag: #editing

Recounting Four Takeaways From ACES 2018

Leave a comment

To keep my copyediting skills sharp, I was off to the 2018 national conference of ACES: The Society for Editing in Chicago, IL. It was a great opportunity to learn new practices in the industry. The following are four lessons I’m taking away from the event.

  1. Language: Understand that we, the people, choose how we use English, which is one reason Merriam-Webster expands and revises its entries annually.
  2. Bias detection: Follow an inclusion checklist that assumes the writer doesn’t understand why a point is offensive yet do push back, requesting supporting research and consulting an expert. Avoid labels, which means scrutinizing whether an identifier like race is relevant. (You can check out more about that “Is This Biased?” from its handouts.)
  3. Workplace: Build social capital with colleagues, which means acknowledging when a staff person does a great job so that one can build from that good foundation to confront on and resolve an issue. Now this session was geared toward workplace leaders, but I think it works in collaborative settings too.
  4. Overall: Don’t give people an excuse to stop reading.

It’s probably a cliché at this point, but I still believe it: the copy editor is often the last line of defense—checking the accuracy of information before it reaches the reader. Every publication from the corporate office to the newsroom needs reliable copy editors—professionals who are the first readers of a writer’s work. These professionals preserve writers’ voice while checking grammar, spelling, and punctuation; reviewing the text structure and flow; and verifying facts. Why do they do that? Because writers, no matter how educated or experienced, immediately lose credibility among readers when they spot errors or are confused by the text. We (copy editors and writers) don’t want to lose our readers; we want our writers’ story to get out.

Conference gear

Getting the Style Sheet Right

Leave a comment

A style sheet is an invaluable tool that ensures consistency. Per The Chicago Manual of Style (2.52), “for each manuscript the editor must keep an alphabetical list of words or terms to be capitalized, italicized, hyphenated, spelled, or otherwise treated in any way unique to the manuscript.” The style sheet makes sure each volume in a series or title released by a publisher maintains the integrity of previous releases. Consider:

  • The author of a series will want to ensure her hero’s physical characteristics and background are consistent from book to book. For example, a hero identified as a six-foot detective with a degree in criminal justice from Michigan State University in book one would raise an eyebrow if he alludes to his eternal love for his college mascot, the Buckeyes, and his frustration at never being able to find pants for his five-foot frame in book three.
  • A Christian theology book should decide whether it wants to use God or god. Readers may question whether God refers to a single, supreme being and whether god connotes some less significant meaning.
  • Education publishers will want to be consistent in how they treat frequently used terms, like response to intervention, students with disabilities, and professional learning community but Professional Learning Community at Work.

When creating a style sheet, I make sure to:

  • Alphabetize my entries
  • Apply capitalization, italics, or other special treatments that have been decided
  • Make sure any style decisions are consistent with what’s been decided in the author’s or publisher’s previous books on the topic (In fact, I’ll copy the entries from the style sheet of the author’s last book onto the one I’m creating for the newer title.)
  • Copy any acronyms, mnemonic devices, definitions, questions, or other special elements the author lists. For example, “A KWL chart determines what a student knows, would like to know, and learns from a lesson.”

I always err on the side of giving too much information. My goal is a polished, professional book that’s consistent with its publisher and author’s previous works and that the next editor will find easy to follow.

There you have it!