Articles
What Editors Do
Adapted from original material at Editors Association of Canada
An editor works first for an audience of readers. The editor’s job is make sure that what is interesting or important about an author’s work is expressed in language the main audience can quickly and easily understand.
An editor also works for the organization that hires him/her to make sure that publications are accurate, attractive, pleasing to the audience and will not cause any legal or other problems for the organization (copyright, political censure, cultural sensitivities).
Finally, an editor works for an author. In addition to checking accuracy and improving readability, the editor ensures that the ‘voice’ of an individual author comes through in the text.
Working With An Editor
Editors come in all shapes and sizes. Retired professionals sometimes take up editing to fend off boredom or ‘keep their hand in’. College students and English teachers will offer editorial services to make extra money. Depending on your needs, a part-time or semi-professional editor may suit your purpose well enough.
If you just want to ‘correct the English’ in an internal report, almost any fluent English speaker can do the job. If you are printing 2500 four- color brochures to showcase your project or program or submitting a journal article to an internationally refereed journal, you might want someone with considerable experience editing that kind of material for that purpose. The more specialized the text and the more ‘professional’ the publication you want to produce, the more you should budget for editing.
Professional editors offer more than expertise in modern language usage, style and tone. A good editor will spot inconsistencies and potentially damaging or sensitive material that should be revised. In addition, a professional editor can help you design your publication to facilitate printing. Professional editors will most often be members of one or more professional bodies.
Levels Of Editing vs Cost
In practice, there is little difference in the time required and hence the final cost for different levels of editing. Issues include the type of publication and its purpose, the author’s skill as a writer, reading level of the intended audience, how much control the author wants to give the editor, how much space is available for completed text and final cost of publication. It can, for example, take less time and effort to rewrite an article than to copyedit or structurally revise it.
Structural Editing and Rewriting
Structural editing may include adding or deleting entire sections of text; combining, dividing or relocating existing sections; moving some material to appendices; deleting or rewriting large blocks of text within a section; choice of rhetorical strategies; level of descriptive detail and any other measures required to clarify meaning or improve readability for the intended audience.
Stylistic Editing
Clarifying meaning, eliminating jargon and unnecessary repetition; ‘smoothing’ language, and other non-mechanical line-by-line editing; creating or recasting tables and or figures.
Copyediting
Correcting grammar, spelling, punctuation, and other mechanics of style; checking for consistency of fonts, point size, capitalization, line spacing, use of fixed expressions, citations and references, margins, page numbering and other such details.
Proofreading
Proofreading is a separate and highly specialized skill. Proofreading is a process of hunting for the tiniest of errors (a spelling mistake, a space in front of a comma, the wrong article, a missing hyphen, inconsistent word forms, a “form” that should be a “from”, a change in font or point size, etc.) while at the same time keeping an eye on syntax, sentence construction and overall consistency. It is extremely difficult for either the author or the editor to proofread a text they are working on because their familiarity with the text makes them blind to errors at this level.
