Copyediting Tips

By Kelly Norris

Being your own editor is tricky business, because as writers we tend to mentally fill in what we know is supposed to be there, and it’s therefore easy to overlook a missing word, letter, apostrophe, et cetera. Editing someone else’s work can also be a thorny proposition, because an editor must know what "mistakes" are genuine and which fall under the umbrella of creative license. It is usually easier to edit simple copy, such as Web content, brochure text and manuals than to edit fiction, because such pieces are typically less artistic and more traditionally structured. But even Web copywriting composed to deliver a message may pose a quandary for the copyeditor. Take, for example, this sentence:

Everyone must rely on their own instincts.

This sentence is grammatically incorrect because its subject, everyone, represents a non-specific individual, while their suggests two or more people. English has as one of its flaws an absence of a gender-neutral pronoun, and it forces writers wishing to adhere to proper form to rely on the cumbersome his or her when composing a sentence like the above example. The correct version is:

Everyone must rely on his or her own instincts.

Common use has made replacing his or her with their acceptable in casual situations, such as friendly conversation and informal writing, but it’s important to know when the substitution is not appropriate.

If you’re writing or editing professional text, it’s particularly important to have a solid grasp of grammar, punctuation and sentence structure. Certainly many readers will overlook common mistakes, but those with the knowledge to spot your errors will pass over you as a copywriter or copyeditor in favor of someone less inclined to be sloppy.

Let’s look at some typical mistakes and see how readily you identify them. Each of the following sentences has a least one flaw.

How many errors were you able to spot? To find out, let’s look at how these sentences should have appeared: