At its most basic, to copyedit means to edit a document (the “copy”) so that it conforms to house style (house as in publishing house) or the rules and practices a publisher follows involving such matters as spelling, capitalization, and source citations, as well as abbreviations, punctuation, and numbers and dates—the list could go on. Copyediting also strives to make consistent the way certain elements, such as proper nouns and prefixes, appear or are treated or “styled.” Copyediting occurs after a paper has been accepted for publication but before it is typeset.
House Style
House style (the rules and practices involving spelling, capitalization, and so forth) is usually constructed from three sources. The first is one of the major style guides. Every academic publisher—Sage, Routledge, Duke University Press—will use one of the major style guides as its default guide. Some popular ones are The Chicago Manual of Style, The MLA Handbook, the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association, and The Associated Press Stylebook. The major guides comment on a vast number of minute points of style. The latest edition of Chicago (the seventeenth), for instance, is well over one thousand pages long, with a 129-page index, and contains sixteen chapters, some of them divided into over two hundred sections.
The second source of house style is a style guide that is particular to the publisher and applies to all of the publisher’s books and journals—a press-wide style guide. It is usually an unpublished, privately printed document of twenty or so pages created by the publisher and distributed to the publisher’s staff. It usually records departures from the default style guide and reinforces or clarifies points of style in the default guide.
The third source is a guide that is particular to a single journal or publication. Again, it is usually an unpublished, privately printed document that records departures from or clarifications of both the default and the press-wide style guides. It takes precedence over the first two, and the second takes precedence over the first. Thus, to resolve a point of style, a copyeditor should first consult the journal-specific style guide, then the press-wide style guide, then the default style guide.
In addition, every publisher should have a dictionary of record—a dictionary that is the last word on how to spell words that are not covered by house style. American publishers often use Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary; British publishers, the Oxford English Dictionary.
House style will address a large number of matters, and as a copyeditor becomes more experienced, he or she will develop a good feel for when a point of house style comes into play. Some of the most common are as follows:
Spelling. Should it be favor or favour? acknowledgement or acknowledgment? travelled or traveled? appendixes or appendices? policy maker, policymaker, or policy-maker? anti-trust or antitrust? company-wide or companywide? e-mail or email?
Capitalization. Should it be, “The President met with the Secretary of State,” or “The president met with the secretary of state”? Should it be Table 1 or table 1? Should it be Section 3 or section 3? Should it be the Industrial Revolution or the industrial revolution?
Numbers. Should it be 8 students or eight students? Should it be 76 books or seventy-six books? Should it be 22nd floor or twenty-second floor? Should it be 1,000,000, one million, or 1 million?
Dates. Should it be 6 July 2002 or July 6, 2002? Should it be the 1940s or the 1940’s? Should it be 1970–1988 or 1970–88?
Punctuation. Perhaps most important, is the serial comma used?[1] That is, should it be red, white, and blue (with a serial comma) or red, white and blue (no serial comma)?
The most significant component of any house style pertains to source citations. House style should stipulate how sources should be cited—either in footnotes, in endnotes, or in a reference list used in conjunction with in-text, author-date citations. It should also stipulate the information a citation should contain, the order in which the information should appear, and the punctuation that should appear before and after each piece of information.
With books, it is customary to provide at least the author’s name, the title of the book, the city of publication, the name of the publisher, and the date of publication. With journal articles, citations usually provide the author’s name, the title of the article, the title of the journal, the date of publication, the volume and issue numbers of the journal, and the page numbers of the article.
Electronic publications, however, are changing the conventions. Some electronic-only journals, for instance, are not divided into issues or volumes; instead, articles are published as soon as they go through production, and their locations are fixed via DOIs (Digital Object Identifiers) rather than volume, issue, and page numbers. Then there are the many online-only sources such as Vox, HuffPost, and CNET. The style guides are still sorting out how to treat those. Are they blogs, news services, digital newspapers or magazines, or something else entirely?
Consistency
In addition to house style, the other important concern to the copyeditor is consistency. Consistency refers to making sure that the same word or element or circumstance is styled the same in every case, that, say, a given word or proper noun is spelled, capitalized, and rendered the same way throughout a document.
Many matters of consistency will be resolved by house style. For instance, whether to hyphenate words formed with prefixes such as anti, non, and multi should be determined by house style: depending on what house style says, the spelling should be postmerger (closed, no hyphen) throughout or post-merger (hyphenated) throughout—but not both.
Compound words are also an important area for consistency. Should the noun be health care (open, with no hyphen) or healthcare (one word)? Decision maker, decision-maker, or decisionmaker? Field work or fieldwork? Sometimes the style guide will help—a publisher’s or journal’s style guide often contains a list of words and how they should be spelled. If the style guides are no help, then the publisher’s dictionary of record should be consulted.
Proper nouns should also be rendered consistently, and of course correctly, throughout. The name of the body of economists who advise the US president is the Council of Economic Advisers, not the Council for Economic Advisers; furthermore, Advisers is spelled with an er, not an or; it should be made that way throughout.[2]
Jargon, too—especially jargon invented for the author’s immediate purposes—lends itself easily to inconsistent treatment. If an author decides to call something a generalized Rubinstein solution, the term should appear that way (lowercase g, lowercase s, no hyphens) in every instance. (And of course Rubinstein should be spelled the same in every case—and not, say, as the equally common Rubenstein, with an en.)
To help with consistency, a copyeditor should create a style sheet as she works her way through a manuscript (especially a book-length manuscript), an alphabetical list of words or terms (especially jargon and proper nouns) and how they are spelled and capitalized or otherwise treated in the document at hand.
The Ethos of the Copyeditor and Revising an Author’s Prose
As with all skills, copyediting improves with experience. Over time, the new copyeditor will develop a keen eye for detail and a sharp nose for error. Experienced copyeditors will come across, say, trade winds (lowercased) on page 8 and remember that, on page 3, it was Trade Winds (capitalized); they will make the capitalization, one way or the other or as house style dictates, consistent throughout. They will read a book title such as The Historical Origin of Political Economy and know that Origin (singular) should probably be Origins (plural).
With experience, they will come to know more and more facts: the poet is Ben Jonson (no h), the think tank is the Brookings Institution (not the Brookings Institute), the city in California is Berkeley (not Berkley). They will, like all good scholars, be skeptical of everything they read and value the foundation of good scholarship: accuracy and documentation. They will take pleasure in checking a quotation and correcting a transcription error, knowing that they have in a small but important way shored up the scholarship in the paper.
Let me close by saying a few words about revising an author’s prose. A copyeditor should certainly correct any grammatical and spelling errors as well as revise any unidiomatic usages and expressions. But copyeditors should be extremely careful about revising an author’s prose. The first paper I was ever given to copyedit was by an economist; it was on race and education. Completely unfamiliar with the language of the social sciences, I rewrote what to me was the author’s unnatural and, at times, incomprehensible English, turning it into (I was convinced) simple, clear prose. What I didn’t know was that the author was writing in a language that, if unsuited to the general public, was entirely suited to his intended audience and to his identity and purposes as a writer. As he paged through the paper in my presence, he only shook his head, bewildered and annoyed.
The first rule of copyediting, like the first rule of medicine, is to do no harm. The last thing an author needs from a copyeditor is what I gave my first author: a mess to undo. For that reason, a light hand is preferred to a heavy one, and a large part of the art of copyediting—an art that one develops with experience—is to know when to change something, when to query the author, and when to leave something alone. By all means undangle dangling modifiers, make verbs agree in number with the subject, and (perhaps) reorder information in a sentence to improve the flow. But unless an author has given the copyeditor permission to rewrite her prose, such rewriting should generally be avoided. Less is usually more.
Copyediting, aside from its basic concerns of house style and consistency, should be seen as an exercise in quality control. The copyeditor is a backstop, assuring that the text is, by all appearances at least, as error free and as accurate as possible. A good copyeditor shores up, tidies up, tightens and checks. He or she is the night patrol who, right before the end of a shift, goes through the building and makes sure that the lights are off and the doors are locked.
[1] The serial comma, also called an Oxford comma, is the comma that appears after the penultimate item in a series of three or more items.
[2] A JSTOR search in September 2023 turned up more than 2,700 items with the errant Advisors and almost 250 items that contained both spellings.