Certain projects require the copyeditor to serve as more than a second set of eyes. Heavier intervention may be needed, for example, when the author does not have native or near-native fluency in English, when the author is a professional or a technical expert writing for a lay audience, or when the author has not been careful in preparing the manuscript.

Sometimes, too, copyeditors find themselves juggling the conflicting needs and desires of their constituencies. For example, the author may feel that the manuscript requires no more than a quick read-through to correct a handful of typographical errors, while the publisher, believing that a firmer hand would benefit the final product, instructs the copyeditor to prune verbose passages. Or a budget-conscious publisher may ask the copyeditor to attend to only the most egregious errors, while the author is hoping for a conscientious sentence-by-sentence polishing of the text.

Copyeditors who work for publishers are usually given general instructions about how light or heavy a hand the text is thought to need. But no one looks over the copyeditor's shoulder, giving detailed advice about how much or how little to do. Publishing professionals use the term editorial judgmentto denote a copyeditor's intuition and instincts about when to intervene, when to leave well enough alone, and when to ask the author to rework a sentence or a paragraph. In addition to having a good eye and ear for language, copyeditors must develop a sixth sense about how much effort, and what kind of effort, to put into each project that crosses their desk.

In the pre-computer era, copyeditors used pencils or pens and marked their changes and questions on a typewritten manuscript. Today, some copyeditors still work on hard copy, but many sit at a computer and key in their work—a process variously called on-screen editing, electronic manuscript (EMS) editing, online editing,or editing on disk.Regardless of the medium, though, a copyeditor must read the document letter by letter, word by word, with excruciating care and attentiveness. In many ways, being a copyeditor is like sitting for an English exam that never ends: At every moment, your knowledge of spelling, grammar, punctuation, usage, syntax, and diction is being tested.

You're not expected to be perfect, though. Every copyeditor misses errors here and there. But do respect the four commandments of copyediting:

• Thou shalt not lose or damage part of a manuscript.
• Thou shalt not introduce an error into a text that is correct.
  (As in other areas of life, in copyediting an act of commission is more serious than an act of omission.)
• Thou shalt not inadvertently change the author's meaning.
• Thou shalt not miss a critical deadline.

Copyediting is one step in the process by which a manuscript is turned into a final published product (e.g., a book, an annual corporate report, a newsletter). Here, we will quickly survey the copyeditor's six principal tasks; the procedures and conventions for executing these tasks are described in the chapters that follow.

1. Mechanical Editing

The heart of copyediting consists of making a manuscript conform to an editorial style(also called house style).Editorial style includes:

spelling
hyphenation
capitalization
punctuation
treatment of numbers and numerals
treatment of quotations
use of abbreviations and acronyms
use of italics and bold type
treatment of special elements (headings, lists, tables, charts, and graphs)
format of footnotes or endnotes and other documentation

Mechanical editingcomprises all editorial interventions made to ensure conformity to house style. There is nothing mechanical, however, about mechanical editing; it requires a sharp eye, a solid grasp of a wide range of conventions, and good judgment. The mistake most frequently made by novice copyeditors is to rewrite portions of a text (for better or for worse, depending on the copyeditor's writing skills) and to ignore such "minor details" as capitalization, punctuation, and hyphenation. Wrong! Whatever else you are asked to do, you are expected to repair any mechanical inconsistencies in the manuscript. For an example of the differences purely mechanical editing can make in the look and feel—but not the meaning—of a document, compare these selections from articles that appeared on the same day in the New York Timesand the San Francisco Examiner.

New York Times February 22, 1987 TARGET QADDAFI By Seymour M. Hersh Eighteen American warplanes set out from Lakenheath Air Base in England last April 14 to begin a 14-hour, 5,400-mile round-trip flight to Tripoli, Libya. It is now clear that nine of those Air Force F-111's had an unprecedented peacetime mission. Their targets: Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi and his family.... Since early 1981, the Central Intelligence Agency had been encouraging and abetting Libyan exile groups and foreign governments, especially those of Egypt and France, in their efforts to stage a coup d'état....Now the supersonic Air Force F-111's were ordered to accomplish what the C.I.A. could not.

San Francisco Examiner February 22, 1987 TARGET GADHAFI By Seymour M. Hersh Eighteen U.S. warplanes set out from Lakenheath Air Base in England last April 14 to begin a 14-hour, 5,400-mile round-trip flight to Tripoli, Libya. It is now clear that nine of those Air Force F-111s had an unprecedented peacetime mission. Their targets: Col. Moammar Gadhafi and his family.... Since early 1981, the CIA had been encouraging and abetting Libyan exile groups and foreign governments, especially those of Egypt and France, in their efforts to stage a coup d'etat....Now the supersonic Air Force F-111s were ordered to accomplish what the CIA could not.

Which is correct? (Or which is "more correct"?): American warplanes or U.S. warplanes? Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi or Col. Moammar Gadhafi? F-111's or F-111s? coup d'état or coup d'etat? C.I.A. or CIA? In each case, it is not a matter of correctness per se but of preference, and the sum total of such preferences constitutes an editorial style. A copyeditor's job is to ensure that the manuscript conforms to the publisher's editorial style; if the publisher does not have a house style, the copyeditor must make sure that the author has been consistent in selecting among acceptable variants. At book publishing firms, scholarly journals, newspapers, and magazines, a house style is generated by having all copyeditors use the same dictionary and the same style manual (e.g., The Chicago Manual of Style, Words into Type, The Associated Press Stylebook, Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association).In contrast, companies that produce documents, reports, brochures, catalogs, or newsletters but do not consider themselves to be bona fide publishers often rely on in-house style guides, on general lists of do's and don'ts, or on the judgments and preferences of copyeditors and editorial coordinators.¹

2. Correlating Parts

Unless the manuscript is very short and simple, the copyeditor must devote special attention to correlating the parts of the manuscript. Such tasks include

verifying any cross-references that appear in the text
checking the numbering of footnotes, endnotes, tables, and illustrations
specifying the placement of tables and illustrations
checking the content of the illustrations against the captions and against the text
reading the list of illustrations against the illustrations and against the captions
reading the table of contents against the manuscript
reading the footnotes or endnotes against the bibliography

Some types of texts require special cross-checking. For example, in cookbooks the list of ingredients that precedes a recipe must be read against the recipe: Is every ingredient in the initial list used in the recipe? Does every ingredient used in the recipe appear in the list of ingredients? Similarly, when copyediting other kinds of how-to texts, one may need to check whether the list of equipment or parts matches the instructions.

3. Language Editing: Grammar, Usage, and Diction

Copyeditors also correct—or ask the author to correct—errors or lapses in grammar, syntax, usage, and diction. Ideally, copyeditors set right whatever is incorrect, unidiomatic, confusing, ambiguous, or inappropriate without attempting to impose their stylistic preferences or prejudices on the author.

The "rules" for language editing are far more subjective than those for mechanical editing. Most copyeditors come to trust a small set of usage books and then to rely on their own judgment when the books fail to illuminate a particular issue or offer conflicting recommendations. Indeed, the "correct" usage choice may vary from manuscript to manuscript, depending on the publisher's house style, the conventions in the author's field, and the expectations of the intended audience.

A small example: Most copyeditors who work for academic presses and scholarly journals are taught to treat dataas a plural noun: "The data for 1999 are not available." But copyeditors in corporate communications departments are often expected to treat data as a singular noun: "The data for 1999 is not available."² Moreover, a corporate copyeditor is likely to accept 1999 as an adjective and to favor contractions: "The 1999 data isn't available."

A second example: Between the 1960s and the late 1980s, many prominent usage experts denounced hopefullyas a sentence adverb, and copyeditors were instructed to revise "Hopefully, the crisis will end soon" to read "It is to be hoped that the crisis will end soon." Almost all members of the anti-hopefullyfaction have since recanted, though some people, unaware that the battle has ended, continue what they believe to be the good fight.³

The history of the hopefullycontroversy serves as a reminder that there are fads and fashions, crotchets and crazes, in that cultural creation known as grammar. For copyeditors who work on corporate publications, a solid grasp of current fashion is usually sufficient. But an understanding of current conventions alone will not do for copyeditors who work on manuscripts written by scholars, professional writers, and other creative and literary authors. To succeed on these types of projects, the copyeditor needs to learn something about the history of usage controversies:

[A copyeditor] should know the old and outmoded usages as well as those that are current, for not all authors have current ideas—some, indeed, seem bent upon perpetuating the most unreasonable regulations that were obsolescent fifty years ago. Yet too great stress upon rules—upon "correctness"—is perilous. If the worst disease in copyediting is arrogance [toward authors], the second worst is rigidity.⁴

4. Content Editing

Copyeditors are expected to call to the author's attention any internal inconsistencies or discrepancies in content as well as any structural and organizational problems. On some projects you may be asked to fix these kinds of problems by doing heavy editing or rewriting. More often, though, you will be instructed to point out the difficulty and ask the author to resolve it.

Copyeditors are not responsible for the factual correctness of a manuscript, but you are expected to offer a polite query about factual statements that you know to be incorrect.

Manuscript:The documents arrived on February 29, 1985.
Copyeditor's query:Please check date—1985 not a leap year.

Manuscript:Along the Kentucky-Alabama border...
Copyeditor's query:Please fix—Kentucky and Alabama are not contiguous.

Manuscript:During the Vietnam War, the most divisive in American history,...
Copyeditor's query:Accurate to imply that Vietnam was more divisive than the Civil War?

If you have some knowledge of the subject matter, you may be able to catch an error that would go unquestioned by a copyeditor who is unfamiliar with the subject. Such catches will be greatly appreciated by the author, but only if you can identify the errors without posing dozens of extraneous questions about items that are correct.

Another misdeed you must guard against is inadvertently changing the author's meaning while you are repairing a grammatical error or tidying up a verbose passage. And it is never acceptable to alter the author's meaning simply because you disagree with the author or believe that the author could not have meant what he or she said. Whenever the content is unclear or confusing, the copyeditor's recourse is to point out the difficulty and ask the author to resolve it.

Most publishers also expect their copyeditors to help authors avoid sexism and other forms of biased language. This is a relatively new convention in publishing and, as the ongoing debate over "political correctness" demonstrates, the terms of this convention are still in flux. In addition, copyeditors call the author's attention to any material (text or illustrations) that might form the basis for a lawsuit alleging libel, invasion of privacy, or obscenity.

5. Permissions

If the manuscript contains lengthy quotations from a published work that is still under copyright, the copyeditor is expected to remind the author to obtain permission to reprint the quotations. Permission is also needed to reprint tables, charts, graphs, and illustrations that have appeared in print. Special rules pertain to the reproduction of unpublished materials (e.g., diaries, letters).

6. Typecoding

Copyeditors may be asked to typecode the manuscript, that is, to identify those portions of the manuscript that are not regular running text. These pieces of text, called elements, include part and chapter numbers, titles, and subtitles; headings and subheadings; lists, extracts, and displayed equations; table numbers, titles, source lines, and footnotes; and figure numbers and figure captions.

Copyeditors working on hard copy are usually asked to pencil in the typecodes in the left margin of the manuscript. Copyeditors working on-screen may be asked to insert typecodes at the beginning and end of each element.

What Copyeditors Do Not Do

Given that there is no consensus about how to spell copyediting,⁵ it is not surprising that the meaning of the term is somewhat unsettled. In the world beyond book and journal publishing, copyeditingis sometimes loosely applied to cover a range of editorial tasks. For clarity's sake, the following distinctions are worth preserving: Copyeditors are not proofreaders. Although many copyeditors are good proofreaders, and all copyeditors are expected to catch typographical errors, copyediting and proofreading are two different functions. Copyeditors work on an author's manuscript and are concerned with imposing mechanical consistency; correcting infelicities of grammar, usage, and diction; and querying internal inconsistencies of fact or tone. Proofreaders, in contrast, are charged with correcting errors introduced during the typesetting, formatting, or file conversion of the final document and with identifying any serious errors that were not caught during copyediting.⁶

Copyeditors are not rewriters, ghost writers, or substantive editors. Although copyeditors are expected to make simple revisions to smooth awkward passages, copyeditors do not have license to rewrite a text line by line. Making such wholesale revisions to the text is called substantive editing or content editing.

Copyeditors are not developmental editors. Copyeditors are expected to query structural and organizational problems, but they are not expected to fix these problems. Reorganizing or restructuring a manuscript is called developmental editing.

Copyeditors are not publication designers. Copyeditors are expected to point out any item in the manuscript that may cause difficulties during production, for example, a table that seems too wide to fit on a typeset page. But copyeditors are not responsible for making decisions about the physical appearance of the publication. All physical specifications—typefaces, page layout, the formatting of tables, the typographical treatment of titles and headings, and so on—are set by the publication's designer or by someone wearing the designer's (not the copyeditor's) hat.

LEVELS OF COPYEDITING

If time and money were not an issue, copyeditors could linger over each sentence and paragraph in a manuscript until they were wholly satisfied with its clarity, coherency, consistency, and correctness—even with its beauty and elegance. But since time and money are always an issue, many book and corporate publishers use the terms light, medium, or heavyto let copyeditors know how to focus and prioritize their efforts. A publisher's decision about the level of copyediting to request for a given project is based on

the quality of the author's writing
the intended audience
the schedule and budget for editing and publication
the author's reputation, attitude toward editing, and work schedule
the size of the final print run
the importance of the publication to the publisher

In the best of all possible worlds, decisions about the level of copyediting would be based solely on an assessment of the quality of the writing and the needs of the intended audience. But in many cases, financial considerations and deadline pressures win out: "This manuscript is poorly written, but our budget allows for only light copyediting" or "This manuscript would benefit from a heavier hand, but the author has many pressing commitments and won't have time to read through a heavily edited manuscript, so let's go for light editing."

There are no universal definitions for light, medium, and heavy copyediting, but you won't be too far off target if you follow the guidelines presented in table 1. You could even show these guidelines to your editorial coordinator and ask which statements best match his or her expectations for your work.

In addition, before beginning to copyedit, you should ask the following kinds of questions:

Audience

• Who is the primary audience for this text?
• How much are readers expected to know about the subject?
• How will readers "use" the publication? Will it be pleasure reading or professional reading? Is it a reference guide or a skim-once-and-throw-away document? Will most readers read the piece straight through, from start to finish, or will they consult sections of it from time to time?

• How long is the text?
• What physical form is the text in?
  For hard-copy editing: Is the text double-spaced? (Single-spaced text is difficult to copyedit unless only a sprinkling of commas is required.) How many words are on a page? How legible is the font? Are all four margins at least one inch?
  For on-screen editing: What word processing program did the author use? Has the publisher converted the author's files into another program or format?
• How will the copyedited manuscript be processed?
  For hard-copy editing: Will the entire document be rekeyed, or will someone be inputting only the changes? (If the latter, the copyeditor must use a brightly colored pencil or pen for marking, so that the inputter can easily spot all the changes.)
  For on-screen editing: Is the copyeditor to supply redlined files (i.e., files that show insertions and deletions) or clean files (i.e., files that contain only the copyedited text)? Is the copyeditor expected to code elements or special characters (e.g., letters that carry diacritic marks, foreign alphabets)?
  
• Does the manuscript contain material other than straight running text (e.g., tables, footnotes or endnotes, bibliography, photos, graphs)? How much of each kind?
• Are there legible photocopies of all art?

• What level of copyediting is being requested: light, medium, or heavy?
• Is that request based on scheduling or budget constraints?
• Has the person making the request read the entire manuscript or skimmed only parts of it?
• How many hours or dollars have been budgeted for the copyediting?
• Is the copyeditor expected to substantially cut the text?
• Is the copyeditor expected to check the math in the tables? to verify bibliographical citations?
• Are there any important design constraints or preferences: limits on the amount of art, size of tables, number of heading levels? use of special characters (foreign alphabets, math symbols, musical notation)? footnotes or endnotes?

• What is the preferred style manual? the preferred dictionary?
• Is there an in-house style guide, tipsheet, or checklist of editorial preferences? (A sample checklist is presented on pages 421-29.)
• Are there earlier editions or comparable texts that should be consulted? Is this piece part of a series?

• Who is the author? Is the author a novice or a veteran writer?
• Has the author seen a sample edit?
• Has the author been told what kind of (or level of) editing to expect?

• To whom should the copyeditor direct questions that arise during editing?
• What is the deadline for completion of the editing? How firm is it?

THE EDITORIAL PROCESS

Once you have a sense of the assignment, the next step is to inventory the materials you have been given and ascertain that the materials are complete. Make a list of items that seem to be missing, and track them down immediately.

If you are copyediting on hard copy, make sure you have

all the pages (numbered in sequence)
copies of any tables, charts, or illustrations
captions for the illustrations
text for any footnotes or endnotes
the bibliography or reference list (for an article or book that includes references)
any supplementary materials (e.g., appendixes or glossaries)

If you will be editing on-screen, make a working copy of all the computer files you have been given and put the original disk in a safe place. Open each of your working files and scroll through its contents. Check to see that the files are compatible with your equipment,⁷ and be sure you have all the files for the document. Each type of nontext element (e.g., tables, captions for illustrations, endnotes) should be in its own file. On-screen copyeditors are often given a printout of the document; check to see that this printout is complete. If the author, rather than the publisher, printed the hard copy, you must verify that the hard copy and the files are identical. For a quick spot-check on long projects:

• Open each file and look at the opening paragraphs. Read the first line of each paragraph against the hard copy; they should match exactly.
• Repeat this comparison for the last paragraphs in each file.

Ideally, the publisher's schedule allows enough time for a preliminary skimming of the entire text and two complete editorial read-throughs (passes)of the text. Two passes seems to be the universal magic number: No copyeditor is good enough to catch everything in one pass, and few editorial budgets are generous enough to permit three passes (unless the text is only a few pages long).

The preliminary skim is a quick read-through of the manuscript to size up the content, organization, and quality of the writing; to note elements that may require special attention (e.g., footnotes, tables, appendixes, glossary); and to identify any weak sections of the manuscript that will require extra time.

The next step is to grab a pencil or a mouse and plunge in for your first pass. On the first pass through the text, most copyeditors read very, very slowly. Let me say that again, because it is crucial to your success as a copyeditor: You must train yourself to read v-e-r-y, v-e-r-y slowly—slowly enough to scrutinize each comma ("OK, comma, what are you doing here? Do you really belong here? Why?"), to interrogate each pronoun ("Hey, pronoun, where's your antecedent? Do you two agree in gender and number?"), to cross-examine each homophone ("You there, 'affect'! Shouldn't you be 'effect'?"), and to ponder each compound adjective, adverb, and noun ("Does our dictionary show 'cross section' or 'cross-section'?"). Moreover, you must read slowly enough to catch missing words (a dropped "the" or "a"), missing pieces of punctuation ("We need a hyphen here"), ambiguities in syntax, and gaps in logic.

On your first editorial pass through the manuscript, then, you will want to read as slowly as you can. To slow yourself down, read aloud or subvocalize. An added advantage of reading aloud (or muttering) is that your ear will pick up some discrepancies that your eye will ignore. On this pass, you should look up anythingthat you are unsure of. With your dictionary, style manual, usage guide, thesaurus, and other reference books at your side, this is the time to read up on troublesome mechanical issues, brush up on tricky grammar and usage controversies, and verify your suspicions about factual inaccuracies or inconsistencies in the manuscript. If you have any large, global questions—questions that pertain to the manuscript as a whole—make your best effort to get the answers, from your editorial coordinator or from the author, before you begin your second pass.

The second pass through the text is usually a much quicker read for the purpose of incorporating the answers to any global questions that arose on the first pass, catching the mechanical errors you missed on the first pass, and fixing any errors you inadvertently introduced on your first pass. For a booklength manuscript, try to schedule the second pass so that you can read the entire work in a few days, without interruptions; you are more likely to catch inconsistencies if large chunks of the manuscript are residing in your short-term memory. If the text contains tables or charts, you will need to make a special pass to be sure that all items in the batch are consistent in style and format.

(Some experienced copyeditors reverse this procedure, doing a quick first pass and a slow second pass. During the first pass, they fix all the obvious mechanical errors; the second pass is for less routine matters, issues that they feel can be better addressed after they have read the entire manuscript. Some on-screen copyeditors also make a quick first pass, during which the redlining or mark-revisions feature is turned off and only nondiscretionary changes are made; they then turn on the redlining for the second, in-depth pass. I don't recommend this approach to novice copyeditors, however, for two reasons. First, because few mechanical issues are truly routine for beginning copyeditors, the "quick first pass" is unlikely to be quick. Second, this system deprives copyeditors of the opportunity to catch any errors they have inadvertently introduced, because the in-depth copyediting is done during the second, and final, pass.)

The copyedited manuscript is always sent to the author for review. Some authors make relatively few changes during this review; others may spend considerable time revising, rewriting, and reorganizing. Publishers encourage authors to make changes at this stage rather than later in the process, when alterations can be expensive and time consuming.

The author then returns the manuscript to the publisher for cleanup—one final pass made by the copyeditor or the editorial coordinator.⁸ If the author has ignored any of the copyeditor's queries or restored (stetted)or added text containing an error, the troublesome passages are resolved in consultation with the author before the manuscript is released for production.

During cleanup, the editor scans every page looking for marks by the author and for the author's responses to queries. For a paper-and-pencil copyedit, the cleanup editor sometimes literally cleans messy pages, using an eraser or white-out, or even retypes hard-to-read paragraphs or pages.

Occasionally, cleanup requires the wisdom of Solomon and the diplomacy of Dag Hammarskjöld. These problem cleanups arise when a copyeditor has been overly zealous or has failed to explain persuasively why certain proposed changes are preferable, or when an author is quite attached to unconventional locutions or mannerisms. The cleanup editor cannot override the author, and the cleanup editor cannot ask the author to re-review every rejected change. Instead, the cleanup editor needs to rethink each disputed issue and decide whether the point is worth revisiting with the author: Is one of the 4 Cs (clarity, coherency, consistency, and correctness) at stake? Or is the matter one of conflicting preferences about some small point that will not affect readers one way or another?

In other words, cleanup editors have to select their "battles" very carefully. If the cleanup editor is convinced that the author is inviting peril by rejecting a particular piece of copyediting, the proper course is to rephrase (rather than simply repeat) the concern and, if possible, propose one or two additional alternative remedies. In disputes concerning less important issues, however, the cleanup editor should respect the author's preferences and not raise the matter again. After all, it's the author's name, not the editor's, that appears on the cover.

EDITORIAL TRIAGE

Sometimes a copyeditor is asked to meet what everyone involved in the project knows is an unreasonable deadline for even a light copyedit. In such cases, the copyeditor's first step is to ask the editorial coordinator to help set priorities: Which editorial tasks are most important for this particular project, and which niceties must fall by the wayside?

The list of priorities depends on the project, of course; but for most projects, a minimal task list would include attending to those errors that would be most embarrassing to the publisher and those that would be most confusing to readers. Thus the copyeditor would

correct spelling errors, serious grammatical errors (e.g., faulty subject-verb agreement), and egregious punctuation errors
query factual inconsistencies
make sure all abbreviations and acronyms are defined
list pages containing material for which permission to reprint is required
carefully read the title page, copyright page, and contents page
check the numbering of footnotes, tables, and figures

In other words, mechanical inconsistencies or discrepancies that do not interfere with communication (e.g., capitalization, hyphenation, use of italics, format of lists) would be ignored, as would be almost all matters of diction, syntax, usage, and content. The copyeditor would, however, keep track of the permissions needed (to save the author and publisher from being named in a lawsuit) and would check the contents page and numbering of elements (to save readers the frustration of missing or out-of-sequence items).

If the schedule is a bit more generous, the following items may be added to the task list:

• Break up overly long sentences and overly long paragraphs.
• Revise overuse of the passive.
• Prune repetitions and redundancies.

This kind of triage is painful: It goes against a copyeditor's nature and training to leave poorly punctuated, convoluted sentences and paragraphs whose logic is inside-out or upside-down. But when time is short, it is more important to have read every page than to have labored over the first half of a project and barely glanced at the rest.

Triage for business documents.An entirely different list of triage priorities is offered by Gary Blake, co-author of The Elements of Business Writing and The Elements of Technical Writing.Arguing that errors in spelling, grammar, and punctuation will not "send customers out the door"—unless the misspelled word is the customer's name—Blake places all these mechanical issues at the bottom of his ten-point priority list for business writing. At the top of the list, instead, are those issues that defeat the twin purposes of a business document: to inform and persuade readers and to convey the sponsoring organization's authoritativeness and expertise. For Blake the top-priority items are fixing errors in organization, rewording sentences that are inappropriate in tone, and clarifying language that is overly vague.⁹

Triage for technical documents.In Technical Editing:The Practical Guide for Editors and Writers, Judith Tarutz advises technical copyeditors to ask the following kinds of questions when creating a list of priorities for triage: What matters to the readers? What kinds of errors will readers notice and care about? How important is the document to the readers? What kinds of errors are easy to fix within the time constraints? In practice, then, Tarutz says, "Sometimes you'll fix something that's not very important but is so easy to fix that it would be silly not to. And sometimes you need to ignore something that bothers you but it's OK with the customers, it's expensive to change, and it's not important to change. (Just because it bothers you does not make it wrong)" (p. 167).

ESTIMATES

Because so many people are involved in publishing a piece of printed material, every member of the team must be able to make reliable estimates of completion dates for each task. Copyeditors are typically asked for two estimates: How many hours will the project take? On what date will the copyediting be completed?

The following rules should help you improve your accuracy in making estimates and help you set reasonable deadlines for yourself.

Rule 1. Do not make an estimate or confirm anyone else's estimate of how long a copyediting project will take until you have seen the manuscript.Sometimes a copyeditor is asked to make an estimate after being given a quick description of a manuscript. Unless you have worked with the "describer" before and have great confidence in his or her ability to evaluate a manuscript, your best response is a polite, "I'm sorry but I can't give you a useful estimate until I've seen the manuscript." Once you have the manuscript in hand, you can skim it, select a representative chunk, do a sample edit (say, ten pages), and time yourself. In general, the more material you sample, the more accurate your estimate will be. Remember that your estimate has to allow you enough time for two passes through the manuscript, although the second pass goes a lot faster than the first.

Rule 2. Adjust your base estimate to allow extra time for patches of difficult copy.For hard-copy editing: The heart of an estimate is based on a pages-per-hour rate. But pages that have 450 words take longer than pages that have 300 words. And if the manuscript is printed in a difficult-to-read font, you will find your pages-per-hour rate declining over the course of the day as your eyes tire. How much of a difference can such factors make? Table 2 shows estimates of how many pages an hour an experienced copyeditor would need to complete two passes on a hard-copy manuscript; novice copyeditors will (and should) work at a slower pace. For on-screen editing: Allow extra time for difficult copy (e.g., technical text, tables, eccentrically styled footnotes or endnotes and bibliographies) and for poorly prepared files (e.g., idiosyncratic spacing, extraneous formatting codes, improperly formatted extracts).

Rule 3. As appropriate, allow time for nonediting chores, such as photocopying hard copy, converting or copying disks, and writing memos.For some projects, these tasks will take no more than an hour or two. But other projects may require five or more hours of administrative or housekeeping duties.

Rule 4. Unless you are extremely experienced in making estimates, always add a fudge factor to your best guess.Suppose your sampling of a 150-page manuscript suggests that you can complete 5 pages an hour. Use 30 hours, then, as the base for your estimate. Now add in a fudge factor—from 10 to 20 percent, depending on how confident you feel about your base estimate and how long the project is: The less confident you feel, the larger the fudge factor; the shorter the project, the larger the fudge factor. For a 30-hour base estimate, a 10 percent fudge factor would be 3 hours; a 20 percent fudge factor would be 6 hours. Present your estimate as a range, say, 33 to 37 hours, or 36 to 40 hours.

Rule 5. Be realistic about how many hours a day you can copyedit and still do a good job.Most editors find that they cannot copyedit manuscripts for more than five or six hours a day except in times of utmost emergency. Be sure your work schedule includes time for breaks: at least fifteen to twenty minutes every two hours.

Rule 6. Err on the side of overestimating the amount of time you need.Because copyediting comes early in the production cycle, a missed deadline can throw off the entire schedule. Don't checkmate yourself by setting too tight a schedule.

ONE PARAGRAPH, THREE WAYS

To conclude this overview of the copyediting process, let's look at a short example that illustrates both the levels-of-editing concept and the nature of editorial awareness and editorial reasoning. The sample manuscript reads:¹⁰

Murphy's Law assures us that no amount of proofreading will uncover all the errors in a work about to be published. The question is, how many re-readings are reasonable? In my personal experience I have found that two readings of galleys and two of page proofs will catch 99 percent of the errors. Unfortunately the remaining 1 percent are often the mistakes that not only cause embarrassment but trouble. For example, the wrong numbers for ordering merchandise or misspelled names.

Assume that the editorial coordinator has requested a light copyedit. If you want to use the sample to test yourself, pick up a pencil and copyedit the passage. Focus on mechanical issues and make only those changes in wording that are necessary for the sake of correctness and clarity. For this exercise, the house style manual is Chicago,and M-W Collegiateis the preferred dictionary.

Let's follow Kate as she copyedits this passage. After skimming the entire manuscript, she carefully reads the first sentence:

Murphy's Law assures us that no amount of proofreading will uncover all the errors in a work about to be published.

Kate is unfamiliar with the term "Murphy's Law," so she looks it up in the dictionary and ascertains that the usage is appropriate and that the spelling and capitalization are correct. She detects no mechanical errors in this sentence and makes no changes to it.

Kate moves on to the second sentence:

The question is, how many re-readings are reasonable?

Uncertain about how to treat a question ("how many re-readings are reasonable?") embedded in a sentence, she picks up Chicago, turns to the index, and looks under "questions." The subentry "within sentences" leads her to a discussion and examples that match the syntax of the sentence in the manuscript. She decides to apply the following conventions:

1. The embedded question should be preceded by a comma.
2. The first word of the embedded question could be lowercase or uppercase; Chicagolabels this a "subjective" decision and notes that a capital letter is usually the choice for a more formal question. In this case, Kate judges the author's question to be relatively informal.
3. The question should not be in quotation marks because it is not a piece of dialogue.
4. The question should end with a question mark because it is a direct question.

Since the author has followed all these conventions, Kate changes nothing.

She next wonders whether to keep or delete the hyphen in "re-readings." She knows that for words beginning with prefixes, both Chicagoand M-W Collegiateusually prefer the closed forms: redo, prenatal, postwar,and so on. But Chicagorecommends using a hyphen if the absence of one might cause confusion or misreading: re-cover(as opposed to recover),co-op,and pro-choice. So the question is, will "rereadings" be confusing? She thinks not and decides to delete the hyphen.

Kate now scrutinizes the third sentence:

In my personal experience I have found that two readings of galleys and two of page proofs will catch 99 percent of the errors.

On to the fourth sentence:

Unfortunately the remaining 1 percent are often the mistakes that not only cause embarrassment but trouble.

The fifth sentence brings Kate to a halt.

For example, the wrong numbers for ordering merchandise or misspelled names.

This is a careless sentence fragment; that is, it is not a fragment serving some rhetorical purpose (which would be fine in the right circumstances). Kate decides that the least intrusive way to repair the fragment is to change the period before "for example" to a dash. (She turns to Chicagoto confirm that either a comma or a dash may precede "for example," with the dash indicating a greater break in continuity.) She also changes the order of "wrong numbers for ordering" and "misspelled names" to prevent the misreading of "for ordering merchandise or misspelled names" as one unit of thought. The reordering prevents readers from thinking that one can "order misspelled names." When Kate is done, the last portion of the text reads: "Unfortunately, the remaining 1 percent are often the mistakes that cause not only embarrassment but trouble—for example, misspelled names or the wrong numbers for ordering merchandise."

Kate's light-handed copyedit is shown in figure 1, along with a medium and heavy copyediting of the same passage. The medium-handed and heavy-handed copyeditors, you'll notice, made all the necessary mechanical changes, but they also tried to improve the wording and syntax. In the name of conciseness, they pruned or cut several wordy locutions. But observe that although the heavy-handed copyeditor retained the key points, the edited version is drained of color and personality: Gone are Murphy's Law, the posing of the question to be answered, and the author's statement that the recommendation is based on experience. As you might guess, the author of the passage will be quite upset ("You've torn my writing to shreds! You've eliminated every syllable of humanity!") unless the editorial coordinator and the author have previously discussed the desirability of such wholesale cuts.

If your version of this passage looked more like medium or heavy copyediting, you will want to force yourself to lighten up. Do not machete a manuscript or rewrite a document unless you are explicitly asked to do heavy editing or rewriting. If the author's sentences are clear, correct, and serviceable (as this author's sentences are, with the few mistakes caught by our light-handed copyeditor), let them be. Don't rewrite an author's sentence simply because it is not the sentence you would have written. A reminder to this effect is posted on many bulletin boards in publishing offices around the world:

Resisting this urge will make your life as a copyeditor easier in several ways. First, you will be able to devote more of your attention to your primary responsibilities: When you resist the urge to recast phrases in your own voice, you are more likely to catch mechanical errors, internal inconsistencies, and grammatical mistakes. Second, your relations with authors will be smoother because they will perceive you as an aide, not as a usurper of their authorial powers. Third, both the copyediting and the cleanup will take less time and be less frustrating. Finally, you will neatly sidestep an issue that often troubles novice copyeditors: "How do I maintain the author's style?" That issue will not arise if you focus on copyediting—not rewriting—and if you explain problems to your authors and ask them either to resolve the problems or to select among the alternatives you are posing.

1. I use the term editorial coordinator to denote the person who is supervising an in-house copyeditor or who is assigning work to a freelance copyeditor. In book publishing, this person's title may be managing editor, chief copyeditor, production editor, or project editor. In other industries, the title begins with a modifier like communications, pubs (short for "publications"), or documentation and concludes with one of the following nouns: manager, editor, specialist.

2. The origin of the controversy lies in the etymology of data, which is a plural in Latin (the singular is datum) but is now often used in English as a singular collective noun (similar to information). Cf. M-W Collegiate, s.v. "data": "n pl but sing or pl in constr . . . Both constructions are standard. The plural construction is more common in print, evidently because the house style of several publishers mandates it." The New York Times and APA, for example, treat data as a plural, but 60 percent of the American Heritage Dictionary usage panelists endorse data as a collective singular.

3. For a history of the debate and its resolution in the United States, see DEU, s.v. "hopefully"; on the controversy in the United Kingdom, see New Fowler's, s.v. "sentence adverb." Surprisingly, the 1998 edition of The Associated Press Stylebook labels hopefully "wrong" when the desired meaning is "it is hoped."

4. William Bridgwater, "Copyediting," in Editors on Editing: An Inside View of What Editors Really Do, rev. ed., edited by Gerald Gross (New York: Harper & Row, 1985), p. 87.

5. The closed forms (copyedit, copyeditor, copyediting, copyedited) appear in Chicago and are uniformly used by publishers who produce books on editing. WIT, published some twenty years earlier than Chicago, allows for copyeditor but prefers copy editor and copy-edit. M-W Collegiate shows copy editor and copyedit. Copy Editor, a respected bimonthly newsletter, opts for copy editor and copy editing.

6. Some publishers skip the word-by-word proofreading stage when a manuscript has been typeset directly from copyedited disks. The author is usually sent a set of proofs and encouraged to proofread them carefully, but at the publishing firm the proofs are simply spot-checked for gross formatting errors.

7. Copyeditors who work in-house and those who work as independent contractors (free-lancers) for publishers will receive compatible files from the publisher. Freelance copyeditors who work directly with authors should discuss file formats and compatibility with prospective clients. These freelancers may also find it worthwhile to purchase a dedicated file-conversion package rather than rely on the format-conversion modules that are embedded in the word processing programs.

8. Some publishers reserve cleanup for a senior editor; others expect the copyeditor to do the cleanup because the copyeditor is the person most familiar with the manuscript. Should an author seem extremely dissatisfied with the copyediting, the cleanup may be handed over to another editor, both to spare the copyeditor's feelings and because a fresh pair of eyes may be more objective in resolving the disputes between the copyeditor's suggestions and the author's preferences. Having someone other than the copyeditor do the cleanup may also be preferable when the editorial coordinator wants to get a better sense of the project or evaluate the quality of the copyeditor's work.

9. In the middle of Blake's list-after revising vague wording and ahead of correcting punctuation errors-are attending to the overuse of the passive voice, fixing overly long sentences and paragraphs, rewriting "weasel" words and hedging phrases, cutting redundancies, and selecting the correct member of a confusible pair of words; see Blake, "It Is Recommended That You Write Clearly," Wall Street Journal, April 3, 1995, p. A14.

10. This example is based on a passage in Arthur Plotnik's The Elements of Editing: A Modern Guide for Editors and Journalists (New York: Macmillan, 1982), p. 7. For the purpose of this example, errors were introduced and other changes were made to the published text.