Proofreading and Editing
Discover high Quality Copy Editing and English Proofreading Services
To describe copyediting in a layman’s language, it simply means polishing a language. The art of proofreading encompasses within its purview checking the language mainly for punctuation, spelling, grammar, and syntax. Copyediting however can be more complex wherein you may have to change language or even facts in the absolute context of the work you are editing. Copyediting and proofreading services are essential content writing services.
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Following are the below mentioned copy editing tips in brief that can hone you copyediting skills and make you a better copyeditor:
Rule 1: Always go Through the Style Guide, fix the Usage Globally and Know Your Audience.
Every piece of writing has certain objectives and a well-planned style guide. The first step before copyediting any piece of writing is to go through the style guide. For Instance, whether the reader prefers British English or American English. Equally important is to know the type of audience that would read your article. The purpose of a piece of writing may be to inform, educate or entertain an audience. And finally be consistent in your style and fix the errors globally – It should not happen that at one place ‘ize’ pattern is followed and at other place in the same writing, ‘ise’ pattern is implemented.
Rule 2: Always Capitalise Proper Nouns
Proper nouns are always capitalized while common nouns are capitalized only if they appear at the beginning of a sentence or are a part of a title case. Proper nouns are the name of specific people, places or things – Donald Trump, Amsterdam or Taj Mahal. Common noun refers to general names of people, places and things – man, capital or sea beach.
Rule 3: Apt Punctuation
Simply defined, punctuation is the use of certain symbols – use of full stop, comma, and brackets used in writing for clarifying the meaning of a sentence. For instance hyphen (-) unites two words in a sentence while dash (–) divides the sentence in two parts.
You can notice the importance of punctuation in the following instances:
“Let’s eat Grandmother.” This sentence implies eating grandmother as a meal.
Let’s eat, Grandmother. This sentence implies taking the meal along with grandmother
Rule 4: Title Case or Sentence Case
Title case is mostly used in headings while sentence case is used in general. The working rule for the title case is to capitalise first letter of every word except preposition and conjunction. However, capitalise preposition and conjunction only when it has four or more letters.
Rule 5: Spell Numbers
The general rule is that spell both cardinal and ordinal numbers from one through nine. However, use Arabic figures for numbers 10 and larger.
Finally, Always double check the assignment before submitting it for publication. Here is an instance of a grave error committed by an editor:
“The Raped Action force was deployed.”
In a hurry, the word ‘raped’ was used instead of ‘rapid’ in the above line which is a great blunder.
Conclusion – Editing and Proofreading can make your document look beautiful where the audiences can enjoy a seamless reading experience without the hiccups in form of spelling, grammar or sentence structure mistakes. Proofreading and editing are the final acts which helps your document go to your end users/readers.