December 21st, 2024 – Things to Note When Editing Your Work

As a scopist, transcriptionist, or proofreader, editing is one of the key points of the job. Each transcript and/or situation is different and requires different expectations when editing. One could argue that this makes being good at editing an even more challenging and important task.

I have learned a lot of things in my years as an English teacher, scopist, and traveler. In my work, I have learned just how many easy mistakes can be made when editing. In my travels, I have learned how the rules involved in the English language are often unspoken but widely regarded. Combining this information has helped me to create a checklist of sorts of things to be wary of when I’m editing my own work.

Check the Country of Origin

As a scopist with clients in Canada and the United States most notably, the dictionary and spelling in use are of the utmost importance. I’ve mentioned this before when discussing other aspects of scopistry and transcription, but it is worth noting in many avenues, which indicates it’s importance.

It is baffling how easy it is to make this mistake. Your brain gets into a habit of using and spelling words a certain way, and you don’t always think to check yourself. It’s important to change things like your language settings in order to guarantee you don’t make those kinds of mistakes. Also, keep a list of commonly used words that are spelled differently between the dialects somewhere you can access and remind yourself of easily. Hold yourself to a higher standard and make sure you’re checking commonly made mistakes often.

Context

Context is important in all languages. Understanding the surrounding language and situation your subject is speaking about will determine a lot of the grammar, punctuation, and spelling that is necessary in your writing. English is rife with homophones and homonyms that could easily be incorrectly identified in these sentences if the context of the conversation is misunderstood.

It’s important when you are editing your work for you to understand the topic of the conversation and the direction it seems to be going, as it will determine what kind of language you’re using, the spelling you need to consider, and the punctuation that would be necessary in these situations.

Prosody

Prosody is another aspect that we need to be mindful of when we are considering things like homophones and homonyms.  Merriam Webster refers to prosody as “the rhythmic and intonational aspect of language.” Whenever a person is speaking, often the meaning of their words can be interpreted by their prosody. As English heavily focuses on context in sentences, it is often used to convey the meaning of the sentence, which we can determine from prosody.

Listening for the prosody in order to determine the context of the sentence can help determine which spelling variation needs to be used. One of the most common examples of this that I have seen is the difference between “their,” “there,” and “they’re.” Listening to the prosody of the speaker can help determine which one of these words they intend to use, and helps to avoid any confusion in the sentence when editing.

Verify Your Sources

This seems like an obvious one, but it is worth noting. No matter what kind of work you are doing, be it fact-checking or spell-checking, you can never be too careful about where your information is coming from. Check to make sure you are getting information from a reputable source, including online dictionaries. Any website that can be freely edited by the public with no moderation is not a reputable source.

In Conclusion

English has a lot of unwritten rules that are widely followed and regarded. We may take them for granted since we grew up understanding them, but that doesn’t make them less important. Think of the rule of adjective order. It is described as “so ingrained that it’s virtually inviolable, even in informal speech.” We often cannot describe why the words belong in this particular order, but we know when asked to describe something, which order the words are meant to be in. The adjective order is determined by the most meaningful adjective. The word that is more relevant and unique to the noun and stands to have the biggest effect on it will be the word that sits closest in the adjective order. Many English speakers cannot put that into words. All they know is that it flows better to say, “big, bad wolf” than “bad, big wolf,” or “great, green dragon” than “green, great dragon.” Editing has a similar style.

A lot of the rules we follow when we are editing are unspoken but widely regarded. Things like verifying your sources, and thinking about context and prosody are very obvious to people who speak English as their native language or those who have spent many years in the academic environment. But these things are still incredibly important, even if we don’t always know to include them in lists of “things to do.”

I hope you enjoyed this as much as I did! If you liked this post or want to share your own experiences and tips, make sure to leave a comment down below. If you want to see more, check out the last post below or the previous posts on the blog. And if you’re interested in learning more scopist, proofreading, or transcription information, make sure to check back for a new post on the Next Step Scopist blog!

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