5 Tips to Save Money on a Copyedit

There’s a reason editors and proofreaders exist: it’s REALLY hard to check through your own work for errors or confusing wording. After all, you know what you meant to write, so your brain will happily agree that it’s all grammatically perfect and makes total sense. Not helpful, brain. And yes, a professional editor like me will pick up on errors and clunky phrasing, but we generally charge per hour rather than per page, so the cleaner your manuscript, the quicker it will take to edit, and the cheaper it will therefore be.

Of course, the obvious way to trick your brain into reading your work with ‘fresh eyes’ is to take a break from it for a couple of weeks. However, it’s not exactly a viable option to do that in between every single read through if you want to… well, get your book finished in a timely manner. So here are a few quick and easy techniques from the world of copyediting and language teaching to help you nudge your brain into a more efficient ‘editing mode’.

1. Alter the visuals

After years of marking 6th Form coursework, my top tip for self-editing is to make something visually different when you go back to check through what you’ve written. Even a simple change to the font, line spacing, margins or page colour of your document can help you spot issues your eye might have flitted over before.

2. Change your location

A change of scenery can have a similar effect. If you work on a laptop or tablet, try moving away from where you normally write to another spot in the house (I’m a big fan of armchair editing) or go crazy and pop to the local library or coffee shop. As an added bonus, the time you take relocating is time where you step mentally away from your manuscript, and that brief moment of relaxing your mental focus can bring new problem-solving insights.

3. Annotate instead of editing

Personally, I find my self-edits are much more efficient when I hand annotate my work first. (My theory is that it helps me to spot patterns in my own writing.) I have a nifty setup which involves exporting documents to my iPad as a pdf and marking them up with a stylus. If you don’t have that kind of dual device option, and don’t want to keep printing things out, you could read the pdf on your phone and highlight where changes are needed, or simply track your changes in Word.

4. Read it out loud (or harness the power of text-to-speech)

Potentially time consuming, but there’s nothing like listening to your own work to highlight where the text isn’t flowing or where you’ve made a SPAG error! (If you use ‘text to speech’, just make sure the programme you’re using isn’t feeding your writing to a generative AI model.)

5. Narrow your focus

There are whole lists of things that you need to read for when you’re doing line edits and it can get overwhelming if you try to do it all at once. When I’m copy-editing I’ll do several passes of a document, because there’s a limit to what you can keep in your conscious mind at any one point. So I might look at continuity and sense on one read, then do separate passes for punctuation and spelling. My advice, therefore, is to pick a very small number of things you want to focus on for a particular read through, write them on a Post-it or scrawl them in biro on your forearm, and try not to get sidetracked. This allows your mind to focus properly on spotting errors and issues, and will lead to a much more accurate edit.

Unsure which areas you need to focus on with your proofreading? Book a ‘snap shot copyedit’ to get feedback on where your most common errors tend to occur.

This article is adapted from one originally posted on my Substack. You can read the original here.