Copy editors are crucial in publishing, especially for magazines and newspapers. They review and edit material, offer content suggestions, and ensure accuracy. A good copy editor has strong writing and editing skills, as well as grammar skills. They are responsible for checking facts, numbers, and images, and designing the page layout. Their job is to ensure every aspect of the publication is correct, and mistakes fall on their own head.
In any publishing company, one of the most important people from a production standpoint is the copy editor. Magazines and newspapers, in particular, couldn’t do without an editor’s eagle eyes, even in this age of spell-checking, grammar-checking, and spell-checking. They do review the material, but they can also offer content editing suggestions.
A good copy editor will likely have a degree in English or journalism. Whatever her degree, she will have strong writing skills, but more importantly, good editing skills. Good editing involves being able to reword a passage so that it sounds better, but doesn’t destroy the writer’s “voice.” Good editors also have strong grammar skills. Journalists without English or journalism titles can make serious grammatical errors, and the editor must be on the lookout for them before they go to print.
A publication, especially a newspaper, lives and dies on its perceived accuracy. If people start to notice a lot of grammatical errors and poorly worded sentences, they will start to wonder if the publication can clarify the facts if it can’t even detect an error in the use of the apostrophe. When these doubts creep in, circulation can start to drop.
In most publications, the copy editor is the last set of eyes on a story. The writer composes the story and hopefully does the rough editing and spell checking. The writer’s editor then reads the story, making changes here and there, but is usually more interested in the content than the mechanics. When the copy editor gets the story, he cares about both of them.
Everyone has seen stories in newspapers and magazines that had repeated paragraphs or some other glaring error. A vigilant editor could have prevented those errors from making it to print. This is why it is important for the person to print a physical copy of the page, rather than continuously reading it on the computer. A hard copy page allows the editor to see the entire article, rather than just pieces at a time.
The publisher carefully checks the story for spelling errors, formatting errors and content errors. He will check that local place names are spelled correctly and look for a hundred other things. Most also write headlines on stories, so they need to think of appropriate and accurate headings for articles.
This person is also responsible for putting the stories on the page and designing the page in many cases. He checks that the articles arrive on the page in their entirety and that, if they continue on to another page, they actually “jump” to that page. Paragraphs deleted at the end of columns and missing jumps give text editors nervous.
A good copy editor also checks all dubious-looking facts. Checks the numbers in stories to make sure they are correct and makes sure the correct images are displayed with the correct captions, with all people in the image correctly identified. In short, it is this person’s job to make sure that every page, article, story, brief, word, and headline is correct. Since the responsibility for mistakes always falls on his own head, it’s hard work. However, when done right, the company has a publication to be proud of.
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