Know a pro: Copyeditor

As you know, research, writing, and publishing are hard work. Fortunately, numerous professionals can support you along the way.

Welcome to my Know a Pro series, where I introduce you to helpful services and professionals who provide them. You know me as a coach and developmental editor, and this series will expand your network with people who provide additional services. Today’s spotlight is copyediting. My colleague Colleen O’Reilly is a freelance academic editor and owner of Colleen O’Reilly Editorial Services. She kindly agreed to be interviewed about what copyeditors do and when you might need one. You can find Colleen at www.colleenworeilly.com

“know a pro” card with photo of Colleen O’Reilly, her services, business name, and URL

What's your academic background and how did you get into editing? 

I have a PhD in art history (I study the history of photography) and left grad school intending to pursue a faculty position, but within a few years began to feel like that wasn’t going to be possible for me. When casting about for ideas about how to pivot, I chatted with a friend who had gone into academic publishing, and she suggested I look into freelance editing. I took some courses, made a profile with the Editorial Freelancers Association (EFA), and through the generosity of others subcontracting with me and offering referrals, plus some good luck, I was able to launch this practice. I’ve been freelancing part-time while also adjunct teaching for about three years.

What kinds of academic writers and projects do you usually work with?

I have really leaned on my own research background and specialized in academic writing in the humanities: art history, film studies, philosophy, cultural studies, and other fields like that. I have worked with grad students and professors on dissertations, articles, and books. I have also done MFA theses, job applications, grants, and curatorial texts.

What services do you offer?

I offer developmental editing, line editing, and copyediting. 

Tell us more about copyediting. How do you explain what it is to your writers? What do you enjoy about it?

I absolutely love copyediting; it is my favorite type of editing to do. I would describe it as cleaning up and fine-tuning a manuscript—polishing, tidying, perfecting, exploring its nooks and crannies. I am there to see the things the author can’t easily see, because of everything else they are doing, and to offer small changes that have a big impact. A copyeditor is there to look for inconsistencies in style and format, to know when you need a period and when you need a comma in a citation, to notice a word or phrase that you overuse, or to call out a confusing sentence construction. When I edit I am offering the author a glimpse into the impression that their manuscript creates and what the reading experience is like. And, I do this as someone who has written texts like this myself. I am familiar with humanities scholarship and with the challenges of academic writing, which I think helps authors trust me to provide feedback that is both useful and sensitive to their goals. I find copyediting enormously satisfying because I can provide this element of polish and attention to detail, which can make a great text come across even more powerfully.

How might a writer know when they are ready for copyediting? Or what is a typical phase in the writing process when copyediting happens?

I ask writers to think of it as the final stage of their process. I want them to think of their text as “done” before they hand it over for copyediting. I think the best way to understand the different kinds of editing is according to the type of changes that I’ll be suggesting—developmental editing means I am suggesting rewriting and rearranging (not worrying much about grammar, spelling, etc.), line editing means I am suggesting revisions on a small scale (sentences as opposed to paragraphs), and copyediting means I am ideally only suggesting changes on the level of words and punctuation marks (and not addressing content or organization at all).

So, you will get the most out of copyediting if you have done absolutely everything you can think of to your text, getting it to the point where you can’t find anything to fix. Then you can hand it over and know that you’re really getting the full benefit of someone else’s perspective. It will be things you couldn’t see yourself, an extra layer of professionalism on top of an already polished text. Your editor will be set up to offer you the most useful feedback possible, the most bang for your buck, as opposed to changes that might get lost in further rewrites. The more polished a text you send, the more polished it will be when you get it back.

In some cases, an academic journal or publisher will hire someone like me to copyedit a text after it has already been accepted or is under contract, and part of the priority there is to make sure the work adheres to their house style. (Copyediting happens before the text is set in the final page design, and then once the page proofs are done it is proofread.) But I also work for authors who have been asked by their publisher to take care of copyediting before they submit, who want help applying the publisher’s style to their work, or who just want to submit the most polished version of their text that they can. 

How should a writer plan for copyediting in the process? How far out should they contact you, and when should they expect a project back?

A writer should plan time at the end of their project, the last phase before their deadline to submit, if they have one. They should plan to send their completed manuscript to an editor, give them time to do their edit, and then give themselves time to address the suggestions and make revisions. The way I work is that I only suggest changes, it is up to the author to review and accept or reject every single one—I want authors to know that they will able to see every single thing I have done in their text, no matter how tiny.

I can turn around an article in 1-2 weeks, and a book in 1-2 months, and in all cases while I definitely do take lots of last minute projects, it is best to contact an editor at least a few months in advance, especially for a book, to get on their calendar and agree to the dates when they will receive the text from you and when they’ll return it. And then for the author, dealing with copyediting suggestions can mean very quick, easy decisions about spelling or punctuation, but it can also occasionally require time—for example, it turns out there is an error in a reference that requires going back to an archival source they haven’t looked at in a few years or hunting down a book they no longer have handy. So writers should plan for that too.

How do your writers get money to hire you?

Most of the time they are drawing from a research or publication grant, or from funds that their department makes available for this purpose. Occasionally people pay out of pocket too, and I do offer discounts for students.

Is there a kind of writer or type of project you'd love to work on next?

I would love to keep working on academic books and articles in humanities fields, and because of my own research I get especially excited about things in art history, history of photography, science and technology studies, critical data studies, and other areas like that. I also am always excited to work with authors working on socially and politically important topics, writing about race, for example, or gender. I want to support people doing that kind of work and help get their ideas out there. I also would love to continue to work with curators writing for catalogues and with artists on the writing they have to do about their own work, such as artist statements and MFA theses. This is something I used to do a lot when I worked in a contemporary art gallery when I was younger, and it’s at the root of what got me into the field of art history in the first place—the specific complexities of writing about art.