Copyediting for Writers

I’m one of those rare creatures, a professional freelance editor as well as a professional writer. (Oddly enough, the two don’t usually coincide.) And I will tell you something right up front: I cannot edit my own writing.

In fact, it’s my strong conviction that no writer can edit their own work. You’re too close to it. You don’t see things that others will see. You may even have fallen in love with certain phrases or thoughts or expressions that really don’t belong in your manuscript. So no matter how well you write, and no matter how much you think you know about spelling, language, and usage, you cannot be your own editor.

Having said that, what you can do is make your manuscript the best that it can possibly be before it goes out to be edited.

I’m not talking here about developmental editing; that’s a completely different enterprise that involves looking hard at things like plot, characterizations, consistency, context, dialogue, and that sort of thing. This is, instead, about the basic nitty-gritty of copyediting.

And you can do the first and even the second round of copyediting yourself.

If at all possible, make sure you have some distance from the writing. Wait a week, or—even better—a month, so you can come back to it with fresh eyes. What you’re going to be doing is checking and standardizing…