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Journalism

The Thing I Like Most About My Copyediting Work

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My real job involves managing and overseeing websites and social media. One of my favorite parts — more than writing — is copyediting.

I’m sorry if you’re surprised that I have a “real” job that doesn’t involve this little blog. There are times I imagine what it’d be like to focus all of my energy on this site. But that, like retirement, still seems to be a long way off. My real job involves managing TV digital efforts. I write and produce my own content. I manage various social media channels. A good deal of my time goes to managing how things look and monitoring how well various products go. A good deal of my time also goes to copyediting my work and other people’s work.

As I’ve said before, copyediting can be a challenge when it comes to your own work. You know what you meant to write, after all.

Our eyes have this curious talent of automatically “fixing” typos a lot of the time. But they especially do this when the writing is our own.

Unfortunately, copyeditors as a full-time job in journalism, have long been disappearing. That isn’t new. Those who work in the field — newspapers, television and digital — are more and more often called upon to be their own copyeditors.

You can see the challenge involved.

Yet copyediting is one of the favorite parts of my job

One of the most popular topics I write about here at Patrick’s Place is grammar. So when I copyedit someone’s work, I can easily go into “Grammar Police” mode. I’m pretty good at catching misspellings and grammar mistakes.

But I find that to be a minor part of the job.

So what’s the bigger part as I see it? Dave Nelson, known on social media as “The Grammar Geek,” recently posted about his work as a copyeditor on LinkedIn. Here is a snippet of what he said:

While placing semicolons correctly and making subjects and verbs agree is fine, what I really dig is making writing clearer. I want the readers to easily understand the writer’s intended message.

Dave Nelson

That’s exactly how I look at it. I love taking a piece of writing — a story or a report — and clarifying what’s there. I love making something complex easy — or at least easier — to understand.

When I’m copyediting someone else’s work, I have to remind myself that they’ve spent hours immersed in the situation. They know the subject better than I do by virtue of having been in the middle of it.

I’m looking at it as an outsider of sorts. In most cases, I know the basics of what they’re writing about. But I don’t necessarily know the fine details.

So what they’ve submitted has to make sense to me. It doesn’t matter if it makes sense to them.

I have to make myself the surrogate reader. If it makes sense to me, it will probably make sense to the reader. If, on the other hand, I don’t understand it, I can’t possibly expect the reader to understand it. I don’t mean that to be arrogant: I make no crack about the readers’ intelligence.

The issue is that if I don’t understand something, I have to assume at least some in the audience won’t either. There are plenty of readers who know more about a subject — the subject I’m editing — than I do. But there will also be those who know less about it than I do.

When I copyedit, I’m never trying to “dumb it down.” But I do try to make it easier to mentally digest. There’s a big difference between the two.

Let me give you an example

We once covered a court case that was a battle before the trial even started. On one particular day, the attorneys argued back and forth all day over the voir dire process. It’s a Latin term, as most court terms are, that means literally “speak the truth.”

But in this particular case, it referred to the jury qualification process. The attorneys argued about how potential jurors would be questioned before they could be selected.

I would have been perfectly happy to simply replace the Latin phrase with “jury qualification.”

But for this one, I couldn’t. That’s because we had quotes from the attorneys that included the phrase. There was no easy way to simply replace the phrase since it was going to be in direct quotes.

One of my pet peeves when I read a news story is feeling like I have to stop, open another tab, and Google a term or phrase to determine the “backstory” of the story. I’m adamant with my team that we make sure anything that isn’t clear needs to be explained gets explained.

Anytime someone needs to leave our site to search to determine what we’re talking about is a time we’ve failed to do our basic job. Sometimes, I’ll throw in a hyperlink to an earlier story to give people more background information. But I try to copy in at least a few lines from that earlier story and include the hyperlink in that. I give the reader enough so that they have a basic understanding and a hyperlink so they can click for a deeper understanding.

That means I’m putting them in the driver’s seat. I’m giving them enough information — and hopefully always more than they may think they need — to understand.

So immediately after the first line in which voir dire appeared, I added this line:

Voir dire is a legal term that means a preliminary examination to determine the competency of a witness or juror.

Simple. Uncomplicated. But informative.

The reader, in that sentence, suddenly had the necessary information to be able to move forward with the rest of the story.

That may not be what most people consider copyediting to be

I know that for most people, when they hear “copyedit,” they think of the angry English teacher sitting at her desk with the red pencil just marking up a student’s work like it’s her favorite sport.

That’s how I used to think of copyediting when I started as well. I think sometimes a writer gets so worried about making sure things are spelled correctly and grammatical that they sometimes forget that they’ve left out a key fact the reader needs. Or they may have skipped over something they thought sure they added.

It’s easy to do.

Unfortunately, the longer you write, it doesn’t get easier. You have to exercise multiple muscles at the same time when you write. But no matter how much you do your best to make sure all your bases are covered, you sometimes just miss something.

Copyeditors play an important role. But thanks to budget cuts across the board, copyeditors are becoming less common, even in newspaper newsrooms. Television newsrooms never have had a role that was just “copyeditors.” In TV, we have executive producers that are supposed to catch mistakes. But sometimes, they’re called in to fill in for the people whose work they’d be going over.

Even digital leaders sometimes have to act as producers, which means they don’t always have that second set of eyes a true copyeditor role would provide.

Spellcheckers like Grammarly can catch a lot. Many can even catch grammar and usage errors. There are even checkers that compare what you’re writing against AP Style rules. (AP Style refers to the Associated Press Stylebook, the style guide that newsrooms around the globe use to make their work more uniform and more easily shareable among AP members.

But most spell, grammar and style checkers don’t have the ability to read like a person and determine exactly what questions a human reader might come up with. That’s why there’ll always be a need for a second set of human eyes.

When those eyes catch the kind of omissions that might make something harder to understand, add them and help the reader have a clearer picture of what’s being communicated, that’s an extremely rewarding feeling.

the authorPatrick
Patrick is a Christian with more than 30 years experience in professional writing, producing and marketing. His professional background also includes social media, reporting for broadcast television and the web, directing, videography and photography. He enjoys getting to know people over coffee and spending time with his dog.