Training Courses
All training is devised specifically to meet your needs. Specific areas are targeted to help your staff understand where and why they are going wrong, and to build trainees' confidence.
A typical three-hour Proofreading workshop:
- practical exercises are used throughout
- introduction to the standard proofreading marks – with exercise
- the more commonly used marks
- checking against copy, technique and considerations
- blind proofreading
- what to look for, what to change and what to leave well alone
Copy-editing
Copyediting is the process that prepares copy for the next stage in the publication process, whether printed or on-screen. A copy editor learns to:
- check grammar, spelling and punctuation
- assign headings
- indicate where bold, italic or any other formatting is to be used
- ensure that the copy conforms to any house style rules
- check that the copy makes sense and is consistent
Although the term 'copyediting' is used particularly in book publishing, it is a useful skill in the preparation of any kind of material for publication.
Grammar
Native English speakers and those who have English as a second language spoken to a sufficiently high level to work in communication, use the rules of English grammar automatically. Even so, there remain various confusing aspects such as:
- which and that
- who and whom
- collective nouns and agreement with verbs
- due to and owing to
- issues of vocabulary such as proscribe and prescribe, few and less, among and between, elicit and illicit
- dangling participles
- split infinitives
All these and many more are discussed with reference to parts of speech and other grammatical terms, introducing these terms where necessary but without blinding trainees with jargon.
Punctuation
In a typical session I would hope to work through all the punctuation points, but if time is limited I concentrate on commas and semicolons because these seem to cause the most problems.