Words Matter

I WAS more than five years into my writing career before I worked with a copy editor, first at a print literary magazine and then for my first book, Poignant Song: The Life and Music of Lakshmi Shankar (HarperCollins India, 2019). Until then I had a murky understanding of what copy editors do and what copyediting entails. I assumed it encompassed making sure I was using correct grammar and punctuation as well as reading closely for any typographical errors. In my experience copyediting was done informally by the same editor who acquired my piece, or in some cases it fell to me, as a last step before a piece went live online. When I finally worked with a copy editor, I came to understand copyediting to be so much more and saw that its impact on literature is crucial. From fact-checking to eliminating repetitive words and crutch phrases to simplifying overly complex sentences, copyediting left my prose clearer and cleaner.

For Molly Lindley Pisani, a freelance copy editor and CEO of Star-Splitter Editorial Services, the job of the copy editor is “no less and no more than to help the author make their book into the best possible version of itself.” Building on this, Susan Lumenello, managing editor of Beacon Press, says that copyediting aims to “improve the work through fact-checking, identifying inconsistencies, and finding technical errors (punctuation and such) but also by noting repetition in language, or vague phrasing that might mislead or confuse a reader.” Jennifer Baker, a senior editor at Amistad and the editor of the anthology (Atria Books, 2018), agrees that