How To Copy Edit

If you’re producing professional documents – whether you’re a copywriter, PR, small business owner, marketing manager, press officer or other media professional – you should copy edit any text you write before submitting it to clients or potential clients. Copy editing improves the quality of your writing, reassures clients that you’re a capable business expert, and gives whatever you’ve written more credibility and impact.

Here are the nine ‘how to copy edit’ rules for business writers:

1. Read SLOWLY. Taking time is really the key to copy editing. Once the creative work is done, it’s easy to feel that the work is over. But it isn’t. Dedicate time to copy editing – ideally at least 30 minutes per thousand words. Read SLOWLY, reading aloud if necessary to impede your progress. You’ll catch errors by being slow and pedantic, not by scanning documents quickly. Read documents at least twice, and for over 10,000 words you should be aiming for three reads. Try and have a break in between reads to avoid memorizing the text and reading what you expect to see rather than spotting errors. Scrutinize every word and punctuation mark, and if you’re not sure about anything, double-check it.
2. Add proper nouns (names, places etc.) to your Word dictionary. Isn’t technology marvelous? It goes without saying that professional text should be spell-checked by Microsoft Word before submission to clients. But when you copy edit, you should also double-check all proper nouns not recognized by your Microsoft Word spell checker. Check spelling in a dictionary or online, and add the correctly spelled and capitalized word to your Microsoft Word dictionary – using the ‘add’ button on the ‘Spelling and Grammar’ pop-up box. This will halve your copy-editing time in the future and help eliminate misspellings of proper nouns....

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Author: Susannah Quinn