Proofreading and Copy Editing

I am from a time when elementary education was called grammar school.

I learned to diagram sentences. I still do it in my head when something on the page seems “off”.

I am a fluent native speaker of standard American English.

I’m getting good at guessing a writer’s native language by the little quirks in their diction that throw us monolingual Americans out of the narrative.

I can help.

This the work of someone I follow on The App Formerly Known as Twitter. This author has been encouraged by their followers to turn a series of their highly entertaining posts into a book. This is the first page of chapter 3: Original, Markup in Word, and a Clean Copy of the edited page. The tone is a little first-person casual for my taste, but the author is the final boss. I think I can curb the ellipses, the sentence fragments, and the overused phrases. We have a Zoom meeting this week to talk about formatting—we do not use spaces to center a heading!

This is the work of a friend whose native languages are Ukrainian and Armenian. She is fluent in English but is a little shaky on some of the idioms. Below you will see the original as she handed it to me for proofreading, my markup, and the corrected copy I gave her in 2016. I asked her if I could rewrite it as an article, and as the paper had served its purpose, she gave permission. So you’ll see that too.