Wanted: Editing Checklist

Not totally certain, but try http://www.parapublishing.com Look under resources, there is a ton there. If you don't find what you're looking for, try emailing Dan, he's very responsive and should be able to point you in the right direction.

Good luck

I took technical editing in college and worked for some big govenment places as a tech editor. The textbook was "How to Edit Technical Documents" (the workbook) by Donald W. Bush and Charles P. Campbell. There is a copy at half.com for 2.00 not a bad deal.

This is a list of sentence-level edits which does not cover the regular "copy-editing job," which just covers periods, commas and things you can find in Strunk and White.

Guidelines for decongesting technical prose:


Eliminate repetition
Follow parallelism
Connect with antecedents
Connect with previous sentences and paragraphs
Provide beginning Frameworks
Provide emphasis in sentences at the end
Rescue smothered verbs
Eliminate stacked modifiers
Decongest clogged sentences


Structure level work is totally different.

http://home.earthlink.net/~jdc24/selfEdit.htm
http://skypejournal.pbwiki.com/EditingChecklist

are 2 spots of help

Beyond the obvious, inconsistencies are something to check. Also, look for things that you changed on an earlier version that didn't make it to this version. Or things they changed (thought that they were correcting) that should not have been changed.

Those were the two things that really caught me off guard as I went into the second round of edits.

That said, I was deeeeeply humbled by the craft of my editors.