Photo: Copyeditor’s marks. Going over the…

Jobs:

See more on our Job Board.

Seen by Matt on August 26 2009:

Copyeditor’s marks. Going over the edited manuscript of Rework we just got back from the publisher. Never realized how much copyeditors really have a language of their own.

Looking for a job? Got a position to fill? Check out the Job Board.

Got a web design project in mind? Find a web designer on Sortfolio. Browse by visual style, portfolio, budget, and geographic location.

Over 1 million people use 37signals' simple web-based software to collaborate on projects, track contacts, and organize their business with an intranet.

11 comments so far

Chad Burt 26 Aug 09

Link to rework goes to an admin page.

Happy 26 Aug 09

Do you have to do the editing per their marks, or do they send it to you to keep you in the loop?

Ed 26 Aug 09

So what happens when they want to indicate underlined text? They’ve already used the underline to mean italic or case changes..

ML 26 Aug 09

@Chad: Thanks, fixed.

@Happy: We have to decide whether to keep their edits or not.

@Ed: Not sure. We don’t have any underlined text in the book. I know that to italicize something is indicated by an underlined word followed by “ital” inside a circle. Maybe it’s similar for underline.

Brent Royal-Gordon 26 Aug 09

Ed: You don’t. The things you would underline in handwriting (like book titles) are italicized in print. It’s a much more pervasive convention than you usually realize.

NatalieMac 26 Aug 09

I believe that SGML (and ultimately HTML ) has its roots in this type of hand markup.

When you think about it, making these kinds of marks on a document typed on a typewriter isn’t so different from wrapping some tags around plain text.

EH 26 Aug 09

Following on to NatalieMac, it was just this and my knowledge of copyediting marks that made HTML so easy for me to understand back in the day. I wouldn’t be surprised if there was a causal connection there.

Brian Armstrong 27 Aug 09

Haven’t they ever heard of MS Word’s “track changes” gosh!

Or wiki/diff it? I’m joking a bit, but still…seems a little surprising this is still done by hand. Brian

JF 27 Aug 09

Brian: We all used Word (or Pages) track changes to write the book, but I actually have come to appreciate the hand written copyeditor’s marks for grammar and style. They seem to convey a lot more information than just making the change in Word does.