Davis Editing

A big part of a copyeditor’s (and proofreader’s) job is to bring consistency to a manuscript. I don’t think authors can be faulted for not being entirely consistent in their treatment of words across hundreds of pages. They have the important task of writing—that is, creating content. Editors play a key secondary role in refining what authors create.

Keeping a word list is an important part of copyediting a manuscript. The spelling—including capitalization, hyphenation, and italicization—of words and terms differs from dictionary to dictionary and style manual to style manual. For the copyeditor, spelling isn’t a given; it’s a decision. The word list helps the copyeditor during the editing process and also helps other editors and the author down the line.

I recently copyedited Signposts to God: How Modern Physics and Astronomy Point the Way to Belief (IVP Academic) by Cambridge particle physicist Peter Bussey, a book filled with facts and ideas I’d never encountered before. Here are a handful of words that ended up on my list of sixty-plus items:

alpha particles
antielectron
antihydrogen
doublethink
First Cause
galaxy (lowercase for general use; but Andromeda Galaxy)
high-energy particles
infrared
law of gravitation, etc.
non-temporal
sense-experience
thing-in-itself
wave function

Every book employs a unique set of vocabulary, so every editing project requires a word list.