Description

This 6-week online course is an introduction to 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.) Assignments must be submitted in Word. Students will learn the basic concepts and skills of copy editing, using Amy Einsohn’s The Copyeditor’s Handbook, 4th edition.

The course will cover the following basics:

Week 1

• Welcome and introduction
• Levels of editing and types of editors
• Editorial process
• Editing checklist
• Handy keystrokes (for Mac and PC)

Week 2

• Assessing and prepping the manuscript
• Working with track changes and find and replace
• Copyediting terms and symbols

Week 3

• Spelling
• Capitalization
• Numbers
• Punctuation
• Abbreviations and acronyms

Week 4

• Style guides, style sheets
• Other reference guides

Week 5

• Fact-checking
• Querying

Week 6

• Editing quoted material
• Editing figures, tables, and other visual elements
• Checking table of contents
• 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 edition

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.