The Copyeditor's Workbook: Exercises and Tips for Honing Your Editorial Judgment

by Erika Buky, Marilyn Schwartz, Amy Einsohn

Overview

Put your editing skills into practice with this new companion to the handbook on every copyeditor’s desk.

The Copyeditor’s Workbook—a companion to the indispensable Copyeditor’s Handbook, now in its fourth edition—offers comprehensive and practical training for both aspiring and experienced copyeditors. Exercises of increasing difficulty and length, covering a range of subjects, enable you to advance in skill and confidence. Detailed answer keys offer a grounding in editorial basics, appropriate usage choices for different contexts and audiences, and advice on communicating effectively with authors and clients. The exercises provide an extensive workout in the knowledge and skills required of contemporary editors.

Features and Benefits

• Workbook challenges editors to build their skills and to use new tools.
• Exercises vary and increase in difficulty and length, allowing users to advance along the way.
• Answer keys illustrate several techniques for marking copy, including marking PDFs and hand marking hard copy.
• Book includes access to online exercises available for download.

 

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780520294356
Publisher:	University of California Press
Publication date:	05/14/2019
Edition description:	First Edition
Pages:	384
Sales rank:	256,888
Product dimensions:	6.80(w) x 9.90(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

Erika Buky is a freelance editor currently based in New Zealand. She joined the University of California Press in 1991 and served as Assistant Managing Editor from 2000 to 2004. She has worked as a freelance copyeditor and developmental editor for scholarly and commercial publishers, research foundations, advocacy groups, museums, and private clients. She has also taught English composition and grammar, rhetoric, and scholarly editing.
 
After earning a PhD in English in 1976, Marilyn Schwartz joined the staff of the University of California Press and served as Managing Editor for twenty-eight years. From 1979 through 2004 she also taught editorial workshops for UC Berkeley Extension. She is the principal author of Guidelines for Bias-Free Writing.
 
Amy Einsohn was a professional editor who worked in scholarly, trade nonfiction, and corporate publishing. She taught dozens of copyediting courses and also conducted on-site corporate training workshops.

Table of Contents

Preface ix

List of Abbreviations xiii

Exercises: A Copyediting Challenge: Test Your Skills 3

Part 1 The ABCs of Copyediting

1 What Copyeditors Do

Exercise 1-1 Comparing Editorial Styles 9

Exercise 1-2 Preliminary File Cleanup 12

2 Basic Procedures

Exercise 2-1 Hand Marking a Manuscript 17

Exercise 2-2 Editing On-Screen 21

Exercise 2-3 Editorial Markup of PDF Files 25

Exercise 2-4 Querying 29

Exercise 2-5 Creating a Style Sheet 30

Exercise 2-6 Writing a Transmittal Memo 31

3 Reference Books and Resources

Exercise 3-1 Using Dictionaries 32

Exercise 3-2 Using Style Manuals 34

Exercise 3-3 Consulting Usage Guides 37

Exercise 3-4 Using the Google Books Ngram Viewer 39

Exercise 3-5 Using Practical Grammar 41

Exercise 3-6 Doing Internet Research 43

Exercise 3-7 Specialized Style Guides 46

Part 2 Editorial Style

4 Punctuation

Exercise 4-1 Punctuation 49

Exercise 4-2 Restrictive versus Nonrestrictive Modifiers 51

Exercise 4-3 Editorial Zealotry: A Light Copyedit 53

Exercise 4-4 American Humor: A Medium Copyedit 54

5 Spelling and Hyphenation

Exercise 5-1 Compound Forms 58

Exercise 5-2 A Publisher's Catalog: A Light Copyedit 61

Exercise 5-3 A Health Newsletter: A Medium Copyedit 63

6 Capitalization and the Treatment of Names

Exercise 6-1 Capitalization 67

Exercise 6-2 Finding Work: A Light Copyedit 70

7 Numbers and Numerals

Exercise 7-1 Numbers and Numerals in Nontechnical Text 75

Exercise 7-2 Numbers and Numerals in Technical Text 78

Exercise 7-3 Editing a Recipe 79

8 Quotations

Exercise 8-1 Quotations 82

Exercise 8-2 It's Our Money Awards: More Quotations 84

9 Abbreviations and Symbols

Exercise 9-1 Medical Language: Abbreviations and Symbols 86

Exercise 9-2 A Travel Guide: More Abbreviations and Symbols 91

10 Tables, Graphs, and Art

Exercise 10-1 Editing Tables 94

Exercise 10-2 Restructuring Tables 95

Exercise 10-3 Editing More Complex Tables 97

Exercise 10-4 Editing Graphs 100

11 References

Exercise 11-1 Editing Author-Date References 101

Exercise 11-2 Taming Citation Managers 103

Exercise 11-3 Editing Reference Notes 106

Exercise 11-4 Creating Author-Date Citations 115

12 Front and Back Matter

Exercise 12-1 Editing a Table of Contents 116

Exercise 12-2 Editing a Glossary 118

13 Markup

Exercise 13-1 Markup of Greeked Text 120

Exercise 13-2 Markup of Instructional Text: A First-Aid Guide 123

Part 3 Language Editing

14 Grammar and Usage: Principles and Pitfalls

Exercise 14-1 Found in the Wild 131

Exercise 14-2 The Truth Is Out There 135

15 Beyond Grammar

Exercise 15-1 Editing for Bias-Free Writing 139

Exercise 15-2 Editing for Plain Language 143

Exercise 15-3 Counting Heads: Beyond Copyediting 151

Answer Keys 157

Appendix: Manual Copyediting Symbols 361

Selected Bibliography 365