In Berkeley

Basic Copyediting

Date Six Mondays, March 15 to April 26 (no class on March 29); 6:30 to 9:30 p.m.
Cost $320 for enrollments paid on or before March 8;
$340 after March 8
Class Limit 20
Instructor Teresa Castle
Location

First Presbyterian Church, Room M201 (McKinley Hall)
2407 Dana Street, Berkeley

(see http://www.fpcberkeley.org/campusmap.asp for maps and directions)

This workshop introduces you to the knowledge and skills you need to copyedit books and other published materials. The course focuses on the principles of editorial style and also covers levels of editing, style sheets, techniques for querying authors, hard-copy and on-screen procedures, and business practices. The instructor provides a detailed critique for all participants who submit a mail-in exercise due two weeks after the last meeting.

Weekly reading assignments are from The Chicago Manual of Style, 15th ed. You will gain a fundamental grounding in Chicago style—the industry standard for many publishers and businesses—and will also learn how to evaluate and edit different types of manuscripts. Plan to devote four hours a week outside of class to the reading and copyediting assignments.

Note: Editcetera offers two introductory courses in copyediting. The courses cover essentially the same topics but use different texts. Basic Copyediting entails the study of selected chapters from The Chicago Manual of Style; reading assignments for The Versatile Copyeditor are from The Copyeditor’s Handbook.

Teresa Castle has worked as an editor for more than three decades in newspapers, academia, and book publishing. She was assistant foreign editor of the San Francisco Chronicle and has worked in book publishing for Harper & Row, Ulysses Press, KQED Books, Mercury House, and other publishers. She directed communications programs at California School of Professional Psychology and the University of Notre Dame. She has taught writing in El Salvador and India and copyediting at UC Berkeley Extension. Teresa holds a B.A. in journalism and an M.A. in English. She enjoys working with writers and editors to help them make the most of their talents.

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