Table of Contents
What is Copyediting?
Copyediting is the process of correcting a manuscript’s grammar, spelling, punctuation, and word usage. It also involves checking for consistency and repetition. Most fiction editors, at least in the US, use The Chicago Manual of Style to guide their editing decisions, along with any house style (a style guide created and followed by a particular publisher), the appropriate dictionaries, and their own industry experience.
My Copyediting Philosophy
For me, copyediting is about removing distractions for the reader so the story itself can shine. Typos, inconsistencies, repetition, words used incorrectly—all this pulls a reader out of the story and reminds them they are reading a book, and not a well-written one.
Good copyediting, on the other hand, means a reader can relax. They know they are being well taken care of, even if they don’t acknowledge it on a conscious level, and they can forget they are reading a book at all. They can become fully transported into and immersed in the story, hopefully until they’ve lost many pleasurable hours and read your book in one sitting, and now they absolutely must purchase book 2. (Good copyediting isn’t enough for this, of course—the story must be working—but readable prose does a lot of heavy lifting and can keep a reader going through a bit of a weird plot stuff.)
Why do we have to follow The Chicago Manual of Style, or any other style guide or reference material? So readers subconsciously know what to expect. Before they ever get to your well-edited book, they’ve hopefully read a bunch of other well-edited ones, and everyone in those books is using em dashes, for example, in the same ways. So when a reader comes across your em dash used in one of these correct ways, they aren’t thinking, “What is that dash doing there?” They aren’t thinking about the punctuation at all. It’s invisible under what really matters to your story—in the case of a skillful em dash, perhaps your characters are having an intense conversation where one is interrupting the other.
(This is one reason the prevalent lack of professional copyediting in self-publishing makes me upset: I believe it trains readers to expect low quality and erodes the reading experience, and the self-publishing industry, for all. But this post isn’t about that.)
When distractions are removed and most best practices followed, an author can then “break” some rules on purpose, knowing that they may be distracting the reader a little but in the service adding impact to a part of the story, or setting up a meaningful payoff using all the tools at their disposal. But when best practices aren’t followed and your prose is a confusing mess, the reader won’t stay interested long enough to get to that cool stylistic thing you tried in chapter three.
(By the way, if you think AI-generated writing is going to help you here, it’s not. Best practices deliberated over by humans passionate about the artful use of the English language are not the same as AI overusing em dashes so much that some people think they should avoid them altogether. The lowest common denominator is not the best practice we should be following.)
So, how do I, as a copyeditor, make sure your book has the best chance of gripping the reader and turning them into a raving fan? I’m going to show you my exact process.
My Copyediting Process
Preparation
Formatting and Scheduling
The first thing I do when I start a copyedit is change the formatting to the following if it doesn’t already have these settings:
- File Type: DOCX
- Margins: 1 in.
- Page Size: US Letter
- First Line Indent: 0.5 in. (And if the client used tabs, I remove them.)
If the client has no objections during the sample edit process, I also impose these settings, as they make it possible for me to accurately estimate pages to edit per day:
- Line Spacing: Double
- Spacing Before and After: 0 pt.
- Font: Times New Roman, 12 pt.
Then I decide how many pages of the manuscript I will edit per day and how it will fit into my next several days of work, after I use up to two days for preliminary checks. (I give myself a certain amount of time per editing round so I can have some flexibility and always return work by the dates promised.)
Preliminary Checks
Before I get into the meat of the copyedit, what I call the read-through, I perform a number of preliminary checks on the file. I learned to do this when I worked at a company that did copyediting for publishers (though this company had their own proprietary software).
First, I run Microsoft Word’s spelling and grammar checker. This is really just to catch glaring errors that this crude checker can find. Mostly it’s me pressing Ignore over and over, but it does show me big typos and alert me to certain names and fantasy terms I can note in the style sheet. (A style sheet is a document I have for each copyedit where I record manuscript-specific editing decisions and any terms or phrases that aren’t in the dictionary and need to be consistent throughout the manuscript or series.)
Next, I run PerfectIt. PerfectIt is an advanced checker specifically for editors and similar professionals, as the user must be trained to proceed based on what PerfectIt flags. It helps me resolve inconsistencies in capitalization, hyphenation, spacing, and so on, and flags missing quotation marks and other things Word can’t find for me. It also performs certain cleanups, like removing double spaces, as well as spaces at the ends of paragraphs. PerfectIt is not AI, and it can take several hours for me to go through this process.
After I run spell-check and PerfectIt, I move on to my own manual checks. Primarily I use Find and Replace (I very rarely do Replace All; instead, I go through each item to see whether it needs to be changed). Here are some of the things I search for and what I replace them with:
- alright → all right
- t-shirt → T-shirt
- try and → try to
- all of → all
- off of → off
- different than → different from
- Then, → Then
- And, → And
- But, → But
- Yet, → Yet
- … → …
I also add spaces around ellipses per CMOS (The Chicago Manual of Style); remove the s from forwards, upwards, and afterwards (depending on the type of English); using ^$^p, search for paragraphs missing ending punctuation; remove spaces at the beginnings of paragraphs; remove unnecessary empty lines; find manual line breaks and change them to paragraph breaks; using ^039, replace straight single quotation marks with smart/curly ones; search for numerals (^#) and spell them out according to CMOS; if the client is missing a lot of commas in compound sentences, search for “^$ and I/he/she/they/it” and “^$ but I/he/she/they/it” and add commas before “and” and “but” as needed; add a comma before “which” as needed; and more. I am always adding new checks as I come up with them because the more I can correct before my read-through, the more streamlined the next phase will be.
At the end of my checks, if necessary, I run a macro I added to Word a long time ago that changes all straight double quotation marks into smart/curly quotation marks. But I will have already corrected these manually if there are not that many. I search for them in Word using ^034.
Read-Through
As I read through the manuscript, I perform copyedits and light line edits. Line editing involves changes to style and language, focusing on sentences and paragraphs. I also remove a lot of unnecessary words like “that.” (Sometimes “that” is needed or improves rhythm, so this is never an absolute rule.)
Every single change I suggest to a manuscript has some sort of reasoning behind it. Most of the time, the reason is that it’s according to a guideline in the most recent edition of The Chicago Manual of Style Online (unless I’m editing to the previous edition for consistency within a series). CMOS has certain dictionaries it recommends, depending on the type of English one is editing (I usually edit US English, but I can also edit for UK, AU, and CA English spellings). Most of the time, I am using my paid subscription to Merriam-Webster Unabridged to find correct spellings, and CMOS stipulates that if there are multiple spellings in the dictionary, the first listed is correct. (For UK, AU, and CA English, I refer to the appropriate editions of the Oxford English Dictionary.)
Occasionally, I will make an editing decision that doesn’t have an explicit guideline behind it. In that case, I am using my industry and genre knowledge and still have a reason behind the decision. (It is the client who decides which edits to accept in the end, and they can always ask me what my reasoning is if they aren’t sure if they’d like to accept an edit.)
While I am going through the manuscript, I will often leave myself placeholders. I use a series of symbols I can easily search for when I am going through the manuscript after my read-through. They are as follows:
- $$$—A generic placeholder; I need to do something about this word or sentence, or I need to finalize a draft comment or resolve a note to myself.
- $$$::—Close repetition; I need to suggest a synonym or other rewording.
- &&&—Bookmark; I can search for this and find where I left off editing.
- $$$abp—There’s an autonomous body part to edit out.
- $$$dm—A dangling modifier needs fixed.
- $$$rw—This sentence needs reworded.
- $$$wc—Word choice; did the client mean something else here?
I am always coming up with new placeholders to leave myself and tweaking my copyediting process in hopes of making it more efficient and constantly increasing the quality of my editing work.
Additional Edits and Final Checks
After the read-through, I go through all my placeholders and resolve the notes I left for myself, making additional edits as needed. Sometimes this part of the process can take a whole workday or multiple workdays, as these edits typically require more thought than the straightforward ones I made during the read-through. Line edits especially can be like really tough puzzles I have to strategize to solve. But I am always excited to move through this step in the process because it means I’m getting close to that sweet dopamine hit of finishing a difficult task!
A note about AI: I have experimented with using ChatGPT and Claude to help me come up with synonyms when I’m fixing repetition, or to help me solve a hard sentence puzzle. I have also tried to get it to assist me with looking up grammar rules or help me make a choice when there is no rule about something. I have since made the decision not to use AI/LLMs in my editing process, as I have ethical concerns about the technology. (I have deleted my ChatGPT account because I take issue with some of OpenAI’s practices.) These programs are also simply not very good or reliable. I have never inputted a client’s manuscript into an AI program, and I always disable Copilot or similar features in Microsoft Word when able.
Once I have no more placeholders left, I proceed to my final checks. These are similar to the preliminary checks but are much quicker. I run Word’s spelling and grammar checker, then PerfectIt. I do a search for & and $ to make sure I have not left any lingering placeholder symbols to confuse the client. Then, with a sigh of relief, I draft an email to the client, attach the copyedited file, and hit send.
Next Steps
Client Communication
After I deliver a copyedit, it is the client’s job to go through and accept or reject all the tracked changes. If they are doing a proofread with me (see below), they can leave the changes they want to keep tracked, and I will accept them before proceeding to the proofread.
I am available over email to answer any questions the client has about the copyedits. Or the client can put comments in the file and send it back for me to reply to them.
Proofreading
The majority of my clients book, at minimum, copyediting and proofreading. So once the client is finished accepting/rejecting the edits, they will often send it back to me for that final round. A proofread is much like a copyedit but is to catch any remaining errors before publication; therefore, there will be much fewer tracked changes in a proofread than a copyedit.
Do you have any questions about the copyediting process? Leave a comment, and I will reply!
Your manuscript needs a copyedit.
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