Editing in Style

Okay, so upon reflecting on my day and letting the thought-floodgates open with my previous post, it occurred to me that something incredibly exciting happened to me today. And I should preface this by saying that this is incredibly exciting to me...

I'm midway through my second editing course at SFU and I'm pleased to know that the things I have learned are starting to apply to my actual job. I'm about to start editing a workbook for patients and so I got cracking on my first ever style sheet! If you don't know what a style sheet is (which a month ago I didn't know as well), here's a brief and helpful rundown by a copyeditor about the importance of style sheets in copyediting. Basically, it's to ensure that things are consistent throughout the manuscript (another word I would never have used seriously until now). These include making consistent choices regarding:

• numbers (written in word vs. numeral form, i.e. three vs. 300)
• symbols (e.g. ml vs. mL)
• spelling (Canadian vs. American) and which dictionary is used as a reference
• punctuation (use of the Oxford/serial comma; whether single or double quotation marks are used)
• capitalization
• hyphenation

On top of this, most copyeditors use a style guide. One of the most well-known is The Chicago Manual of Style. Instead of coming up with your own rules for editing, this guide has them all laid out for you to use as a resource.

So of course, while developing my style sheet, I signed up for a free 30-day trial of The Chicago Manual of Style Online. The world is now my manuscript.

As I said, incredibly exciting!

PS. Someone (Pleuve?) should develop a real Chicago Manual of Style for fashion and give it the same name!

PPS. Today's episode of Jeopardy! was fantastic and one of my favourite categories was called "A 'Whey' with Puns". You guessed it, each question had some sort of homonymic and puntastic relationship between "whey" and "way".