What is manuscript copyediting?

Manuscript copyediting, also known as proofreading, ensures a manuscript conforms to an editorial style, or house style, such as a publishing house’s style preferences.

What does this service include?

Manuscript copyediting includes proofreading your manuscript to ensure that it conforms to the publisher’s editorial or house style. While not changing the meaning of a text, proofreading corrects any inconsistencies in the manuscript, improving the document’s look and feel.

What are the key aspects of editorial style?

Editorial style includes:

• spelling
• hyphenation
• capitalisation
• punctuation
• treatment of numbers and numerals
• treatment of quotations
• use of initialisms
• acronyms and other abbreviations
• use of italics and bold type
• format of footnotes, endnotes, bibliographies and other documentation
• Treatment of special elements. These can include headings, lists, tables, and images. Images fall into two main categories: figures (including photographs, illustrations, drawings, diagrams, logos, graphs, and maps) and tables.

Why is editorial style important?

At book publishing firms – as well as publishers of scholarly journals, newspapers, and magazines – a house style is used to ensure all authors, copyeditors and proofreaders use the same style manual (e.g. The Chicago Manual of Style or the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association, known as the APA Manual). This is to ensure consistency in multi-author publications (e.g., magazines, scholarly journals, reports, collaborative books, edited collections) within a series and across similar publications from the same publishing house.

A house style may also be mandated to ensure consistency with corporate branding.

Is there anything else included in this service?

In addition to confirming the publisher’s preferred style manual, our manuscript copyediting or proofreading service investigates whether there is a preferred in-house dictionary.

We will also request an in-house style guide tipsheet, if available, or a checklist of editorial preferences.

Our proofreading service will also include an investigation of earlier editions or comparable texts that should be consulted. If the document or manuscript is part of a publication series, we will review other texts in the series for comparison.

Who is this service for?

Authors preparing journal articles, book chapters, book-length monographs, edited collections, scholarly books, or professional reports requiring well-written, high-quality, error-free text, in alignment with a publisher’s house style.

If you would like to know more about how Wise Directions Copyediting can benefit you, please contact us today.