Tema Subtema
Part 1. Copy editing Introduction to copy editing; the pre-set rules.

House Style; style manuals and publishers’ style sheets.

Spelling; spelling mistakes and typographical errors; spellchecker; proper nouns, compound words and homophones; British & American spelling.

Idiomaticity; idioms & Idiomaticity; subject-verb agreement; false friends, fickle friends & faithful friends.

Punctuation; basic rules; the comma: the comma splice, relative clauses, the serial comma, a history of the comma; the modern approach to comma use; colons and semi-colons; the hyphen and the en-dash.

Usage; non-inclusive language; split infinitives; dangling participles.
Part 2. Style editing Introduction to style editing; clarity & concision; the historical context; writing to impress vs. writing to express; foggy language; readability statistics: the Gunning Fog Index, the Flesch Reading Ease and the Flesch-Kincade Grade Level; writing guidelines for clarity and concision.

Write tight; writing longer sentences; writing shorter sentences; lists; redundancies; verbosity.

Prefer verbs; nominalisations.

Use parallel structure; bulleted lists.

Prefer the active voice; the active vs passive debate.

Get personal; impersonal writing; personal pronouns.
Small is beautiful; circumlocutions; multisyllabic words; specialised terminology.

Avoid ambiguity; misplaced modifiers; unclear antecedents.

Start strong; expletives.

Be positive; negatives and double negatives.

Cut the strings; prepositional strings.