Stages of revision 16: final copyedit and some further suggestions

 

The end or not the end?

This is the last time you’ll look at your script ….  until it’s accepted and you go through it with an editor or it’s rejected and you take another look at it, some months down the  line, before you send it out again.

Oh yes, by the time you get to this stage you’ve really polished it … and the first thing the publishing house’s editor is going to do is take it apart.

You yourself will do this as well at a later date – because fashions in writing change and you move on as a writer anyway.

To be honest, editing never ends.

 

More of a proof read?

You’ve probably got rid of most of the more obvious mistakes by now. The read aloud edit helps a lot. It may be wise here to concentrate on a few specific things. There are some things that we all get wrong frequently and there will be your own specific common mistakes. E.g. I often type “form” when I mean “from” 

Here is a suggested list but it is by no means comprehensive. It’s a good idea to develop your own list over time.

·         Is dialogue set out correctly?

·         Are you using a word too often e.g. “Gosh” “seems”

·         Is your use of the apostrophe correct?

·         Look out for confusions  such as

o   who’s / whose

o   its / it’s

o    your / you’re, 

o   to/too/two

o   their / there

o   bare / bear

o   affect / effect  

·         Are you consistent in the way you hyphenate words?  

·         Are you consistent in the way you write numbers as words (different styles recommend numbers up to twenty, up to fifty or up to one hundred – can you see which style I’m using?)

·         Are you distinguishing between generic relations – mum, dad, grandpa, and proper  nouns Mum, Dad, Grandpa  

Some proof-reading tricks

Can you bear to start at the end reading one paragraph at a time?

Complete this edit in small chunks.

But perhaps the wisest of all: ask someone else to proof read, or even pay someone else to do it.   

Change the way the text looks

This will help you to get some objectivity. You can:

• Change the font.  
• Single space
• Set it out as booklet
• Print it out as a booklet

 

A final tip

Start each stage of revision in a different place. Otherwise, you tend to rush as you get towards the end and your final chapters will receive less attention.  How many pages does your text have? Divide that by 16.  Say you come up with 25.  So start revisions 1 on page 1, revision 2 on page 26, revision 3 on page 52 etc.

Then get submitting!       

Image by  Lorenzo Cafaro from Pixabay 

Responding to copyedits

Electronic feedback  

I’ve recently had a script back from a copy-editor. It was due 29 September and I finally got it the first week of November. More and more publishers are now using Track Changes on Word documents and it can seem a bit like being at school and getting back work covered in red ink. It’s easy to think your work must be terrible. It isn’t. Otherwise the publisher wouldn’t have accepted it. Your copy editor is good.

It’s very tempting to “accept all” and be done but that isn’t a good option.

Copy-editors are not infallible

This one was pretty good, actually, and made a lot of helpful suggestions. Typos were corrected. My script was aligned with the publisher’s house-style. There were actually just one or two changes I didn’t agree with so I rejected those. And this copy-editor did make one mistake: she misinterpreted an indirect thought as a direct thought. Eventually I also noticed a couple of things she had missed. So, it is a good job I painstakingly moved to every change and either accepted it or rejected it. This usually means accepting two changes at a time – often a deletion then an insertion.

More than a proof read

A copy edit is more than just correcting blatant mistakes. The copy-editor also advises about bits that aren’t working, checks for consistency in content and form and spots stylistic awkwardness, including, for example, the over-use of certain expressions.

How I worked with this particular editor

I kept “Track Changes” on all the time, so that I could see where I made extra changes.  

First of all, I went through every change and either accepted or rejected it. I probably accepted 99.9% of them.

Then I looked at the comments in the margin and responded to them. This produced new text that I had to copy edit myself. Sometimes, though, the comment related to a change I’d already accepted.

I revisited my own corrections and accepted them.

I rechecked my new work.

I kept revisiting chapters where I’d made changes until I’d no corrections left.

All of this took about three weeks. Finally I sent back a script that was much stronger than the original because both a copy-editor and I had worked hard on it.