My Copy Editing Experience and Background:Good copy editors and proofreaders are an odd bunch. Not only are we fanatical about oral language usage, such that verbal errors on television drive us nuts (doesn’t anyone ever correct the writers?), we have to be zealous about the most minute elements in a document. We take great pleasure in finding errors.Many years ago, in my first real job at Empire Life Insurance Company, I started out proofreading and editing forms and reports, actually reading numbers and verbiage out loud (or listening to someone read them to me). For years afterward, I couldn’t read anything without reading capitals and punctuation (“cap”, “semi”, “period”, “para”) in my head. From there, I designed forms for another insurance company for several years. Fanaticism is called for when designing forms. In those days we had multi-part forms with carbon paper between the sheets. Everything had to be lined up perfectly in order for the forms to be used properly. I was also involved in their new simplified English multi-page policy documents, proofing and editing. In every subsequent job I’ve had, either working for someone else or working for myself, I have had some form of proofreading and copy editing work experience. I seem to attract it. As a business systems analyst for many years, I needed to learn the details of a manual, or computer, system as quickly as possible in order to apply the new computer system to it. I loved this level of detail, as it coincided perfectly with the proofreading and editing which I had been doing previously. In the last year, I have written from 70% to 80% of two new websites, which I then edited – SelfMadeSailor.com and Judo4MMA.com. Prior to the websites, I edited the central chapters of the book “Mixed Martial Arts Unleashed” – McGraw-Hill, 2008 – ISBN 0071598901 / 9780071598903. I officially started this business in September, 2008, with various students from the University of Waterloo as my clients, copy editing and proofreading co-op projects and essays, and now also include magazines, websites, and other professional publications in my client list. Angi Jardine March 30, 2009 |
