Indie e-Con: Copyediting Walk-Through

 It’s Indie e-Con week!

This online writer’s conference began yesterday and goes all week on Kendra Ardnek’s blog, knittedbygodsplan.blogspot.com. Each day has a theme, and today’s theme is editing. Editing is, I confess, one of my favorite aspects of writing, but there are all different levels of editing. You can visit the conference to learn about them all, but on my blog today, I’m talking about copyediting.

Copyediting is the most technical type of editing, ferreting out grammar, punctuation, and spelling mistakes as well as other slip-ups that are blatantly wrong (such as an inconsistent character name and obvious factual errors). These things trip up a reader and make your work look less than professional, which is why copyediting is essential.

So . . . to demonstrate via a walk-through, I’ve taken a passage from one of my published books (England Adventure) and generously sprinkled it with fourteen typos. See if you can find the errors. Then, I’ll write the passage again and highlight the errors. I’ll explain each correction, and then write the passage typo-free.

Typos:

“I’m prepared to walk my feet of if I have to!!!” Caroline declared. I’m determined to see everything and anything I can.”
“Me, too!” I said My feet felt like they were on springs, adding to the desparate sense that I had to experience everything, even though I could now realize how vast England was and how impossible that would be.  We were on Purview street now, traveling the way we’d come into Madgwick, where trees, bushes, and flowers grew wildly free and only an occasional sign or bench was tucked.
“There’s so much to see and do in London.” Paris asserted fondly, as if defending a pet object. “Literally the best stores-except what’s in Paris--not to mention all those historical sites, its hard to imagine you’ll have energy for anything else that day. Like I always say, “London is the world”.”

Caught typos:

“I’m prepared to walk my feet of if I have to!!!” Caroline declared. I’m determined to see everything and anything I can.”
“Me, too!” I said My feet felt like they were on springs, adding to the desparate sense that I had to experience everything, even though I could now realize how vast England was and how impossible that would be.  We were on Purview street now, traveling the way we’d come into Madgwick, where trees, bushes, and flowers grew wildly free and only an occasional sign or bench was tucked.
“There’s so much to see and do in London.” Paris asserted fondly, as if defending a pet object. “Literally the best stores-except what’s in Paris--not to mention all those historical sites, its hard to imagine you’ll have energy for anything else that day. Like I always say, “London is the world”.”

Found them? 
- Of should be off.
- There should be only one exclamation point; more than one is really not acceptable in published writing.
- Every dialogue piece should begin with double quotation marks. (At least in American English.)
- Missing period.
- Desperate is one commonly misspelled word. 
- Beware of extra blank spaces, especially at the beginning of sentences. There should only be one blank after punctuation marks.
- Streets are capitalized if they're named.
- Dialogue ends with a comma if it's followed by a dialogue tag (such as said or asserted).
- Em dashes that indicate breaks in thought are dashes the length of a capital M—make sure they're long enough.
- Double hyphens aren't enough, either.
- The comma isn't strong enough to separate two phrases that should be two separate sentences.
- Watch out for its and it's and other tricky homonyms and contractions.
- If someone is quoting within dialogue, single quotation marks set it off, not double. (At least in American English.)
- Quotation marks, single or double, always go outside periods and commas. (At least in American English . . . yep, the differences between British and American rules are tricky!)

And finally, the corrected text:

“I’m prepared to walk my feet off if I have to!” Caroline declared. “I’m determined to see everything and anything I can.”
“Me, too!” I said. My feet felt like they were on springs, adding to the desperate sense that I had to experience everything, even though I could now realize how vast England was and how impossible that would be. We were on Purview Street now, traveling the way we’d come into Madgwick, where trees, bushes, and flowers grew wildly free and only an occasional sign or bench was tucked.
“There’s so much to see and do in London,” Paris asserted fondly, as if defending a pet object. “Literally the best stores—except what’s in Paris—not to mention all those historical sites. It's hard to imagine you’ll have energy for anything else that day. Like I always say, ‘London is the world.'” 

                                                                                                                                   
Obviously, writing is subject to a lot more mistakes than these fourteen, but these are some of the more common ones for you to be aware of. If you have any patience for copyediting, I encourage you to learn more about the rules so you can catch them yourself. Style manuals (such as the Chicago Manual of Style) and dictionaries are the best. But it's still a great idea to have another trained pair of eyes to look at your manuscript, too, because typos are sly little imps that are expert at hiding, and 99% of writing will still harbor a handful even after copyediting and proofreading. But that doesn't mean that we can't try to catch them all!

Do you have any questions about the work of copyediting? If you are a copyeditor, what are some of the most common mistakes you have to correct?