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University of California Press

The Copyeditor's Workbook

Exercises and Tips for Honing Your Editorial Judgment
by Erika Buky (Author), Marilyn Schwartz (Author), Amy Einsohn (Author)
Paperback eBook
Price: $24.95 / £21.00
Publication Date: May 2019
Edition: 1st Edition
Title Details:
Rights: World
Pages: 384
ISBN: 9780520967519
Trim Size: 7 x 10
Illustrations: 25 b/w photographs, 2 line art
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About the Book

Put your editing skills into practice with this new companion to the handbook on every copyeditor’s desk.

The Copyeditor’s Workbook—a companion to the indispensable Copyeditor’s Handbook, now in its fourth edition—offers comprehensive and practical training for both aspiring and experienced copyeditors. Exercises of increasing difficulty and length, covering a range of subjects, enable you to advance in skill and confidence. Detailed answer keys offer a grounding in editorial basics, appropriate usage choices for different contexts and audiences, and advice on communicating effectively with authors and clients. The exercises provide an extensive workout in the knowledge and skills required of contemporary editors.

Features and Benefits
  • Workbook challenges editors to build their skills and to use new tools.
  • Exercises vary and increase in difficulty and length, allowing users to advance along the way.
  • Answer keys illustrate several techniques for marking copy, including marking PDFs and hand marking hard copy.
  • Book includes access to online exercises available for download.
 

About the Author

Erika Buky is a freelance editor currently based in New Zealand. She joined the University of California Press in 1991 and served as Assistant Managing Editor from 2000 to 2004. She has worked as a freelance copyeditor and developmental editor for scholarly and commercial publishers, research foundations, advocacy groups, museums, and private clients. She has also taught English composition and grammar, rhetoric, and scholarly editing.
 
After earning a PhD in English in 1976, Marilyn Schwartz joined the staff of the University of California Press and served as Managing Editor for twenty-eight years. From 1979 through 2004 she also taught editorial workshops for UC Berkeley Extension. She is the principal author of Guidelines for Bias-Free Writing.
 
Amy Einsohn was a professional editor who worked in scholarly, trade nonfiction, and corporate publishing. She taught dozens of copyediting courses and also conducted on-site corporate training workshops.

Table of Contents

Preface
List of Abbreviations

EXERCISES
A Copyediting Challenge: Test Your Skills

PART 1. THE ABCs OF COPYEDITING
1. WHAT COPYEDITORS DO
Exercise 1-1. Comparing Editorial Styles
Exercise 1-2. Preliminary File Cleanup

2. BASIC PROCEDURES
Exercise 2-1. Hand Marking a Manuscript
Exercise 2-2. Editing On-Screen
Exercise 2-3. Editorial Markup of PDF Files
Exercise 2-4. Querying
Exercise 2-5. Creating a Style Sheet
Exercise 2-6. Writing a Transmittal Memo

3. REFERENCE BOOKS AND RESOURCES
Exercise 3-1. Using Dictionaries
Exercise 3-2. Using Style Manuals
Exercise 3-3. Consulting Usage Guides
Exercise 3-4. Using the Google Books Ngram Viewer
Exercise 3-5. Using Practical Grammar
Exercise 3-6. Doing Internet Research
Exercise 3-7. Specialized Style Guides

PART 2. EDITORIAL STYLE
4. PUNCTUATION
Exercise 4-1. Punctuation
Exercise 4-2. Restrictive versus Nonrestrictive Modifiers
Exercise 4-3. Editorial Zealotry: A Light Copyedit
Exercise 4-4. American Humor: A Medium Copyedit

5. SPELLING AND HYPHENATION
Exercise 5-1. Compound Forms
Exercise 5-2. A Publisher’s Catalog: A Light Copyedit
Exercise 5-3. A Health Newsletter: A Medium Copyedit

6. CAPITALIZATION AND THE TREATMENT OF NAMES
Exercise 6-1. Capitalization
Exercise 6-2. Finding Work: A Light Copyedit

7. NUMBERS AND NUMERALS
Exercise 7-1. Numbers and Numerals in Nontechnical Text
Exercise 7-2. Numbers and Numerals in Technical Text
Exercise 7-3. Editing a Recipe

8. QUOTATIONS
Exercise 8-1. Quotations
Exercise 8-2. It’s Our Money Awards: More Quotations

9. ABBREVIATIONS AND SYMBOLS
Exercise 9-1. Medical Language: Abbreviations and Symbols
Exercise 9-2. A Travel Guide: More Abbreviations and Symbols

10. TABLES, GRAPHS, AND ART
Exercise 10-1. Editing Tables
Exercise 10-2. Restructuring Tables
Exercise 10-3. Editing More Complex Tables
Exercise 10-4. Editing Graphs

11. REFERENCES
Exercise 11-1. Editing Author-Date References
Exercise 11-2. Taming Citation Managers
Exercise 11-3. Editing Reference Notes
Exercise 11-4. Creating Author-Date Citations

12. FRONT AND BACK MATTER
Exercise 12-1. Editing a Table of Contents
Exercise 12-2. Editing a Glossary
13. MARKUP
Exercise 13-1. Markup of Greeked Text
Exercise 13-2. Markup of Instructional Text: A First-Aid Guide

PART 3. LANGUAGE EDITING
14. GRAMMAR AND USAGE: PRINCIPLES AND PITFALLS
Exercise 14-1. Found in the Wild
Exercise 14-2. The Truth Is Out There

15. BEYOND GRAMMAR
Exercise 15-1. Editing for Bias-Free Writing
Exercise 15-2. Editing for Plain Language
Exercise 15-3. Counting Heads: Beyond Copyediting

ANSWER KEYS

Appendix: Manual Copyediting Symbols
Selected Bibliography

Downloads

These on-screen exercises can be completed using a word processor and PDF viewer. For instructions and answers, please refer to The Copyeditor's Workbook.

Reviews

“Editors, you’re not done when you’ve read the fourth edition of The Copyeditor’s Handbook. Do every single exercise in the comprehensive Workbook. You have to love a workbook that has an exercise with an editor’s version of the classic lightbulb joke.”—Katharine O’Moore-Klopf, ELS, owner of KOK Edit
 
“The Copyeditor’s Workbook is a dream come true for teachers and students, a major expansion on (but including) Amy Einsohn’s original exercises. Thorough and (yes) often entertaining, the Workbook offers more than forty strategic drills—most of them new—in print and digital form. Perfect for training meticulous yet insightful copyeditors.”—Carol Saller, author of The Subversive Copy Editor
 
“The Workbook triples the number of exercises from the origin Handbook and offers far more scope for classroom settings, solo learning, and informal study groups.”—Pm Weizenbaum, 2018 president of the Northwest Editors Guild
 
“I’m really excited about The Copyeditor’s Workbook. It fills a gap in editor education and will help students develop that most elusive of skills—editorial judgment. With reminders that often there is no one right answer and exposure to different editing techniques and editor resources, the Workbook is an excellent addition to any copyediting course using The Copyeditor’s Handbook.”—Erin Brenner, owner of Right Touch Editing and former owner of Copyediting.com