Exercises
The
copyediting
exercises are designed to make you sensitive to the most common issues
copyeditors need to notice and deal with. All exercises contain a
variety of inconsistencies, mistakes, and questionable usages, just as
do texts copyeditors confront in their work. Most exercises are
accompanied by a resource sheet that directs you to read and summarize
information from the textbook that will help you find and correct
errors in the exercise.
Because
doing
the exercises is essential to your learning editing skills, you must
complete all 10 resource sheets and exercises to pass the class.
Resource sheets and exercises are due at the beginning of class, and
late work will be accepted only with a doctor's excuse.
Begin
by
printing out the resource sheet and the exercise. Fill out the resource
sheet first. (For
exercises 5 and 7, do the assigned reading for the day before doing the
exercise.)
Then read the text in the exercise quickly to get a sense
of its content and tone. Next, work through the text sentence by
sentence, checking anything you notice as a possible error against the
discussions in the textbook and against other resources as necessary.
On difficult questions, note in the margin of the text the page number
of the relevant discussion in the handbook. Mark corrections, changes,
and queries on the printed copy of the exercise using the copyediting
marks shown on pages 31-35 of the textbook.
You
should do a
heavy copyedit of the exercises (see page 13 in the textbook). Do not,
however, engage in massive rewriting, deletion, addition, or
reorganizing of material.
You
can assume
that the copyedited text will be sent to the author for approval, so
you can query the author on things you find confusing. Do not, however,
ask the author to do your job for you: you should correct spellings,
for example, not ask the author if the spelling is correct.
Resource
1 | Exercise 1
Resource
2 | Exercise 2
Resource
3 | Exercise 3
Exercise
4
Resource 5 | Exercise
5
Exercise 6
Resource
7 | Exercise
7
Exercise
8
Exercise 9
Resource
10
| Exercise
10
Exercise
11
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