If there is one book on punctuation I’d recommend to everyone, it’s “Eats shoots and leaves” by Lynne Truss. In this book, Lynne Truss has dealt with all matters related to punctuation in a humorous and engaging fashion. This not only removes the “boring” tag associated with the subject of punctuation, but also gets people involved in punctuating well.

The very title of the book is derived from a famous joke, which has done its rounds all over the world. In case you haven’t heard it, here goes… 

A panda walks into a café. He orders a sandwich, eats it, then draws a gun and fires two shots in the air. 

“Why?” asks the confused waiter as the panda leaves the café. The panda produces a badly punctuated wildlife manual and tosses it over his shoulder. 

“I’m a panda,” he says, at the door. “Look it up”. 

The waiter turns to the relevant entry and, sure enough, finds an explanation. 

“Panda: Large black-and-white bear-like mammal, native to China. Eats, shoots and leaves.” 

In case you are still wondering what that meant…the trick is in the comma placed after “Eats” in “Eats, shoots and leaves.” This comma implies that someone eats something, shoots, and then leaves the scene. The correct entry, of course, would be “Eats shoots and leaves” minus the comma after “Eats” to imply eating shoots ( as in bamboo shoots) and leaves( of plants and trees). 

Now that I have killed the punchline and demystified the joke completely, wouldn’t you agree that a misplaced comma can totally change the meaning of a sentence or a phrase? 

By giving real-life examples from badly written street signs (Come inside for CD’s, VIDEO’s, DVD’s, and BOOK’s) to improperly punctuated movie titles( Two weeks notice), this book is a ready reckoner for people with a sense of humor. She covers apostrophes, commas, dashes, hyphens, and even emoticons (keeping in mind the Instant Messaging era).  

I just noticed one glaring (at least to an ex-editor) error, though. The title page of the book says “The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation”. If she had read her own chapter on hyphens, that should have been “The Zero-Tolerance Approach to Punctuation”. 

That shouldn’t stop you from reading the book, though :) 

Here’s a nicely written article on how to distinguish between essential and non essential editing.

 http://www.jeanweber.com/newsite/?page_id=23

Source: Internet

Here’s a  good write-up for those considering getting into the line:

http://www.dummies.com/WileyCDA/DummiesArticle/id-5260.html

Checklist

Attached is a comprehensive checklist for all copyeditors.

Check out this article. It’s a fun read.

http://www.ibiblio.org/copyed/Stepp.html

www.m-w.com decribes a copyeditor as one who prepares copy for the typesetter or one who edits and headlines newspaper copy.

A proofreader is defined as someone who reads and marks corrections in typeset text.

So clearly, a copyeditor is the one who edits copy before the proofreader. After the copyeditor is done with his or her job, the next stage involves proofreading. This is at the typesetting stage and often the proofreader has to check every single word so that no “typos” are found.

Aside from this basic difference, here’s a list of tasks a copyeditor does: http://www.sfep.org.uk/pub/faqs/fedit.asp

This is a list of tasks a proofreader does: http://www.sfep.org.uk/pub/faqs/fproof.asp

These days there is software for almost every kind of need. So it is with proofreading as well. There is proofreading software available these days by the name of whitesmoke. They claim that it checks for spelling errors, grammatical errors, punctuation errors, and that there is a synonym dictionary and idiom dictionary in the package.

They have separate software for general writing, business writing, creative writing and legal writing.

Go to http://www.whitesmoke.com/ for more details.

A style sheet is a document the copyeditor prepares that lists the grammatical conventions and the distinctive treatment of words (capitalization, hyphenation, favored spellings, etc.) within a particular text.

Information such as ““Fragments are acceptable with this author’s style” and “Split infinitives are acceptable with this author’s style” and the rules for hyphenation  are found on the style sheet.Does the author prefer to lowercase or capitalize a full sentence after a colon? Is the author following British English or American English etc. are some of the details one is likely to find in a style sheet.

Style guides are readily available in the market. The Chicago Manual of Style is a popular style guide for non fiction. It is considered the bible of all style guides.

Ref:http://deannahoak.com/?p=187