Doctor's notes

Many professional editors use PerfectIt, a Word tool that's available for about £55 a year from Intelligent Editing. PerfectIt detects inconsistencies of spelling, capitalisation, hyphenation and more, and also tells you when there’s an opening quote mark or bracket without its partner. I use it at the beginning of a project to help me decide on style and at the end to pick up any lingering inconsistencies.

Paul Beverley generously offers a suite of macros for free. Check out Crystal Shelley’s review of them.

How you treat numbers is mainly to do with style. A common style is ‘zero to nine, 10 and above’ (or ‘zero to ten, 11 or above’).

Beyond a certain number, though, if the numbers aren’t specific it looks terrible to include them as figures (such as ‘1,000s’). So you might add ‘but hundreds, thousands’ to your style instruction.

You will need to know whether you are including commas or another type of separator in numbers from 1,000 onwards. If it’s up to you to decide, it’s a good idea to include separators, otherwise numbers in the early thousands could be mistaken for years (e.g. 2021).

You will also need to consider how you’re dealing with fractions and high numbers, like millions and trillions, as well as ages, dates, percentages and more. You should…

Use ‘on to’ if the ‘on’ forms a unit with the preceding word or phrase:

‘She passed it on to me.’

‘On to’ and ‘onto’ mean two different things:

They walked on to the park
(They continued their journey until they got to the park)

They walked onto the park
(They walked until they were standing on the grass)

The aim of any work we do with punctuation is clarity. For example, we place a comma or a hyphen at a certain point in a sentence not because the rules say so, but to make that sentence absolutely clear. The AP (Associated Press) Stylebook gives the following examples to illustrate the importance of hyphenating (or not hyphenating):

• The story is a re-creation (creating something again)
• The park is for recreation (leisure).

and

small-business owner, better-qualified candidate, little-known song, French-speaking people, free-thinking philosophy, loose-knit group. (Think of the different possible meanings or confusion if the hyphen is removed in each of those examples.)

If you’d…

You will have a style for your quote marks in any piece of writing. This will be “double” or ‘single’. In the UK, single marks currently seem more prevalent, as do double quote marks in the US, but this isn’t something you can assume.

One thing I discourage as an editor, if it’s in my power to, is a two-tier system, where “proper quotes”, with a source, are in double marks, and ‘scare quotes’, that convey a ‘so to speak’ quality, are in single. I think this confuses the reader, who is unlikely to know the difference, and it causes problems in the edit, giving rise to many more queries as you try to ascertain that all the quoted material really is quoted, and all the scare quotes really are scare quotes. It’s an opportunity for mistakes to creep in, and none of us need that.…

In so many ways, the reader is at the core of copyediting. You need to make sure the work is pitched at the right level for the intended reader; you need to ensure they don’t feel unincluded or alienated by the work; you need to take care of elements like structure, consistency and fact-checking so that they are seamlessly drawn through a text without snags; and you need to ensure that the work delivers its promise to them – that what they’re expecting from it materialises.

A useful way to interact with the author is to phrase your queries with the reader at the centre, too: ‘will the reader understand this?’, ‘will all your readers feel included at this point?’, ‘the reader may be expecting a source here; can you provide one?’ Attracting more readers, or a creating a greater…