Practice those copy editing skills

Amy Einsohn's The Copyeditor's Handbook is a terrific resource if you want to refresh your skills for a copy editing job. The book is full of exercises with answer keys.

I worked through the book in 2000 while I was freelancing. The exercises were a good reminder of how important it is to slow down when you're editing. (I'm on a newspaper copy desk now, and slow is not the order of the day. We sometimes slam through stories in a few minutes, which is stressful on a number of levels.) But if you have the luxury of not working on an immediate deadline, take your time.

Style answers in a flash

I subscribe to the online version of The Associated Press Stylebook. It costs me about $20 a year, which I pay out of my own pocket -- but the online version is so much faster to use on deadline that I'm a bit surprised most copy editors don't spring for it. It's $20, granted, but I'll gladly give up a few coffees each year for the speed and ease of use. I also find that the search function digs up additional entries I probably wouldn't have gotten to if I'd just thumbed through the print version.

Housekeeping

I started an Editrix.org site years back, but it wasn't very well developed and I didn't tend to it very often. So I'm setting up here on Blogger with the hopes of making a better go of it. Instead of importing all of my old entries on one day, I'm going to sprinkle them in to backfill the blog. So the early part of this site will be a mix of old and new.

I hope you find the site useful.