A WRITER'S GUIDE TO UNDERSTANDING THE COPYEDITOR by Terry McGarry Originally appeared in the Bulletin of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America permission Many copyeditors prefer to spell the word "copyeditor." I laughed when I got page proofs of a short story I had written about a copyeditor: the anthology's copyeditor had changed my character into a two-word protagonist. As author, I could have stetted my spelling, but I deferred to house style. After you have delivered a finished manuscript, and usually after your editor has gone over it, your publisher's managing editor assigns it to a copyeditor. The copyeditor prepares the manuscript for the typesetter, proofreading for typos and keying design elements. She also styles the manuscript, making sure that its spelling, punctuation, usage, and fonts are internally consistent and follow the publisher's house style. She checks for faulty grammar. Depending on the latitude afforded by the publisher (and whether the editor requested a light or medium copyeditfiction never gets a heavy copyedit), she will either recast grammatically incorrect sentences, shuffling the words into syntactic order without changing them, or she will suggest possible fixes in a query. And she keeps an eye out for errors of logic and continuity, querying things that seem physically impossible or that violate the internal logic of the book's universe. The copyedited manuscript is usually reviewed by people at the publishing housethe editor, the managing editor's staff, or both. Often the author gets to see it as well. The copy editor's queries are answered (called "deflagging" if queries have been written on Post-it Notes stuck to the pages), and if she has made changes the author or editor objects to, those changes are changed back. The manuscript then goes to a type house, where typesetters generate galleys or page proofs; these are read against the copyedited manuscript by one of the publisher's freelance proofreaders. | |
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