Suzanne Gilad

As a copyeditor or proofreader, you can’t possibly remember everything, so you need outside resources and references, and lots of them. Although most resources are available online, it’s still helpful to have certain books on hand. And, of course, you need to know your proofreading symbols so that you can make changes and understand other editors’ changes.

Maybe you're carrying around some archaic images in your skull about what copyediting and proofreading entail. If you assume that taking this career path means you'll be wearing nerdy glasses while forever flipping through dusty grammar tomes and making nice white sheets of paper bleed with the markings from your red or blue pencil, think again.

Proofreaders don't see things the way other people do. They scrutinize. When something is awry, their warning buzzers go off and they swoop down for a better look. They are charged with catching the errors that everyone, including the copyeditor, has missed. What separates good proofreaders from bad is practice.

Most rules are rife with exceptions in the publishing industry, but a few are so standard and ubiquitous that they're well worth memorizing. One set of rules that are pretty standard is how to deal with numbers — whether you should spell them out or use good ole Arabic numerals. Before you start proofreading or copyediting your text, you need to know the basic rules about incorporating numbers into narrative (nontechnical or humanistic) manuscripts and into technical (scientific) manuscripts.

What do Tron, Rubik's Cubes, parachute pants, and political correctness have in common? They all got their start in the 1980s. And while Tron is now a cult classic, Rubik's Cubes are tradeshow freebies, and people no longer wear those awful swishing things, political correctness is here to stay. One of the copyeditor's jobs is to point out when an author strays too far over the fine line between being wisely cautious and being a little silly.

Although they are each a simple horizontal line, hyphens and the various dashes have their own appearances and specific uses. The shortest and most common is the hyphen, which is used for clarifying open compounds (such as "four-armed villains," as opposed to "four armed villains"), for separating number groups in phone and Social Security numbers, and for connecting written-out fractions like three-quarters.

If you’re a copyeditor or proofreader, you know the importance of good reference sources. Much of the information in desk references can be found on the Internet, but a good copyeditor or proofreader should have hard-copy references as well. (You never know when your Internet connection may slow to a crawl.) The following list contains five references you can’t live without: House style sheet: You get this reference from the company you work for or, if you freelance, the person who hires you.

As copyeditor or proofreader, you need to become familiar with the proofreading symbols so that you can make your edits understood. The following tables list proofreading symbols every proofreader and copyeditor should know:

Whether you’re a copyeditor or a proofreader, you probably do a lot of your work electronically. And the Internet is a great place to find helpful and interesting resources, such as those in the following list: Bartleby.com: Letting the resource speak for itself: “Bartleby.com combines the best of both contemporary and classic reference works into the most comprehensive public reference library ever published on the web.