Category: Editing

Work done by student editors to prepare acquired manuscripts for publication. This includes creating, compiling, and applying style sheets, developmental revision in collaboration with authors, and copyediting and proofreading.

Poet as Copyeditor

On By clackamasliteraryreviewIn Editing, To Make Public blog

As a poet, learning copyediting has been very helpful to me. When it comes to formatting, for the most part, poets have the creative liberty to do whatever they please. Before learning copyediting and other processing techniques used in publishing, I believed that to an extreme—putting in all sorts of strange punctuation and stanza breaks just to do so. As an editor, I cringe at that now. Not only for my lack of good reason, but also because I’ve now had to read piles upon piles of poetry, and those pieces with a ton of confusing spacing or punctuation marks are the spark of countless arguments between editors as we try to find out what is intentional, a processing error, or a simple mistake! In the early stages of acquisitions this can be solved through a simple message or email, but when we’re further along in our publishing process and working on copyediting there often simply isn’t enough time to have conversations with our authors.

Working as a copyeditor has helped me better prepare for submitting my poetry for publication and is helping me write my poetry more efficiently and concisely as well.

—Jakey S.

Style sheets: what are they, and who uses them?

On By clackamasliteraryreviewIn Editing, To Make Public blog

Style sheets are just one step in a multi-part process we call editing. Writers may know this as “editing hell” due to the length and tediousness of this task!

A style sheet is used as a communication tool between editors, primarily created in the copyediting phase, that is used as a guide for correctness and for what we determine is the favorable way to maintain consistency among pieces. However, we must be mindful of each story and its stylistic choices through the author’s eyes.

For instance, there are many ways one can use “T-shirt” in a sentence, such as “T-shirt,” “t-shirt,” and “tee shirt.” It’s important to keep the version consistent within each piece and among all the pieces. A style sheet isn’t just for stylistic choices though; it’s also very commonly used for us to simply tell our editor comrades, “Hey, this word is properly spelled; leave it!” A lot of a style sheet will include names of places with odd spellings, names of things from other cultures and/or languages, or things the copyeditors may have had to research to see if they’re even correct.

These sheets are collaborative and discussed between the whole editorial division of our literary magazine and then carefully bundled into a master sheet that is based on the Chicago Manual of Style and our own classifications of “global rules.”

—Alana H.