Secrets of the editing trade
Have you ever wondered what an editor’s toolkit looks like? I thought it might be useful to examine some of the tricks of the trade that Red Pony editors use when reviewing your documents.
Style sheet
Whenever we start work on a copyediting project, the first thing the Red Pony editor will do is set up a new style sheet. In its simplest form, the style sheet is an alphabetical list of odd spellings, abbreviations and other conventions used in the document.
For example, should I write judgement or judgment? According to the Macquarie Dictionary either is correct, so the style sheet enables the editor to note how it is used in this document so this convention can be consistently applied.
References
In my experience, a well-thumbed dictionary is one of the most important tools an editor can have (although nowadays this is just as likely to be the online version). We use Macquarie Dictionary for our Australian clients. We also keep copies of the Oxford and Webster dictionaries in the Red Pony office for projects where UK and US English spellings are required.
The thesaurus is another very handy reference, particularly when trying to find just the right term to describe something, or perhaps trying to avoid overusing a term in a single sentence (synonym for ‘tool’ anyone?).
Finally, a style guide is essential for citing sources, whether you decide to use footnotes, endnotes or parenthetical references, and for compiling a bibliography or reference list. The Chicago Manual of Style, APA (Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association) and Economist Style Guide are well-known examples.
For Australian government projects (and non-government projects for that matter) the Style Manual for Authors, Editors and Printers (sixth edition), published by John Wiley & Sons, is the go-to guide for almost everything, from planning a publication to where to place a semicolon.
Sometimes (if we’re lucky) a client will have their own in-house style guide that defines their preferences for spelling, capitalisation, punctuation (e.g. spaced en-rule or unspaced em-rule for the long dash? Commas or spaces for thousands?). We follow this as the first point of reference, followed by the Style Manual and then a dictionary. If there is a conflict, the client’s own style guide always takes precedence, although depending on the nature of the conflict we may provide a comment in our edit, just to bring the matter to the client’s notice and check that they are happy with the choice we are recommending.
Microsoft Word
Although we work with a range of word processing applications, the reality is that about 90 per cent of our editing and proofreading work is done using Microsoft Word, with the remainder being mostly PDF files.
What makes Word such a useful editing tool is the ability to track changes (including comparing tracked changes from another version of the document) to show what modifications we are suggesting. At Red Pony, we also use the comments function to provide the rationale for our recommendations when this is appropriate, or note where further context may be required.
PerfectIt!
We wrote about this useful little application in a previous post. PerfectIt runs a series of macros through your Word document to check for a variety of common errors and inconsistencies. It is particularly useful as a final quality assurance review for larger documents (at least 20 pages), searching out inconsistent word hyphenations and capitalisations, variant abbreviation definitions, inconsistent heading capitalisation, and bullet capitalisation and punctuation.
By bringing all these tools of the trade to a job, an experienced editor can make a client’s text a pleasure to read.
