Surely editing is just spotting typos?
Who doesn’t like order and calm?
About half the work that I do is editing and proofreading other people’s work (you can see some of the documents that I’ve worked on in my proofreading portfolio). It’s so much more than spotting pesky typos. Creating a consistent document in terms of writing style, headings, terminology, and layout can give a document the professional polish that it needs, making it easy for the reader.
Inconsistencies can be really distracting, taking the reader’s mind away from the important messages that you want to convey. Making sure the text adheres to the style guide can re-enforce your branding and make a collection of texts really gel together in a document (if you don’t know much about style guides, check out my blog post on Do You Need a Style Guide).
One example of a classic distraction is the split infinitive. To go boldly, or to boldly go? Splitting infinitives isn’t technically a massive “no-no”, but the reader can be so excited at this perceived grammatical error that they may stop reading the text, congratulate themselves on their eagle eye, and then…forget where they are in the text, or indeed what they were reading. Spotting these little jarring moments in the text is all part of editing, with the primary goal of guiding the reader as smoothly as possible through the document. This goes double for dreaded jargon words. Plain English is key here to allow the best chance of the reader understanding your message and absorbing your content as quickly as possible.
What to look out for
This translation from original draft to a consistent document is why, alongside copywriting, I enjoy this editing work so much. Take a document such as a university annual report. Written by numerous authors, there’s a good chance the first draft will have inconsistent styles making the document not as cohesive as it could be.
With spellcheck and competent authors, most documents I receive are free from obvious typos and grammatical errors. So what am I on the look out for? Aside from adherence to the style guide, these are the top 10 big hitters that are on my radar, that I see time and time again:
Inaccurate contents page with mis-matched page numbers and titles that don't match the text.
Academic titles and name spellings that are inconsistent - I always Google the name of everyone mentioned in the document. You’d be surprised how often name spellings go awry.
Event titles and academic paper titles that do not match subsequent mentions.
Academic affiliations - again, I Google each institution to avoid any “Bath University” when it should be “University of Bath”.
Foreign terms that should be in italics.
Journal titles and referencing that is inconsistent.
US English spellings instead of British English - “program”, I’m looking at you!
Rogue capital letters.
No to “Masters” and “masters”. Yes to “master’s” even in the plural.
Image captions. I’m not sure why, but there are always mistakes in the image captions. Always.
Time-consuming process
Copy-editing and proofreading to a high standard can be very time consuming. Your team have already spent many hours proposing text, liaising with academics and support staff, chasing, chasing, chasing. This is where I can step in - taking your draft and creating something consistent and beautiful out of it.
In the next few weeks, I’m looking forward to copy-editing my first university annual report for the year. If this is a time-consuming problem that you need solving, please get in contact and see how I can help you.
