Description

This online course is an advanced course in copyediting. Participants should know basic grammar and punctuation and be able to use Microsoft Word, including track changes. (The course does not teach Word skills.) This course is for the experienced editor who wants to build on basic skills and take on more difficult manuscripts. Participants will be editing manuscript excerpts that are especially problematic.

The course will cover the following:

Week 1

• Problems with pronouns
• Dangling and misplaced modifiers
• Collective nouns
• Redundancy
• Copyediting as a business: Author/editor relationship

Week 2

• Adverbs and adjectives
• Verbs
• Author’s voice and tone
• Show, Don’t Tell
• Copyediting as a business: Avoiding scope creep and other issues

Week 3

• Prepositions
• Conjunctions and Interjections
• Sentence structures
• Foreign words and phrases
• Copyediting as a business: Dealing with plagiarism

Week 4

• Rhythm and lyricism: Breaking the rules
• Permissions and legal considerations
• Copyediting as a business: Working with (or avoiding) difficult clients
• Wrap-up

Required texts:
The Copyeditor’s Handbook, 4th edition, Amy Einsohn (The accompanying The Copyeditor’s Workbook is not required for this course, although it has exercises you may want to do on your own.)
Chicago Manual of Style, 17th ed.
Sin and Syntax: How to Craft Wicked Good Prose, Constance Hale

Instructor Lourdes Venard is founder of Comma Sense Editing, which provides services to individual authors and businesses. She has 30 years of writing and editing experience, including at major newspapers Newsday, The Miami Herald, Chicago Tribune, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel and The Washington Post. She also teaches copyediting through an online course at the University of California, San Diego, and is active in the American Copy Editors Society, having served as a scholarship judge for 11 years.