Editing practicalities
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Larger publications should use the services of editors and copyeditors, and every other publisher should try and get their newsletter reviewed by at least one other person before it's sent out. They'll pick up on those errors and problems you just won't see yourself.
If this is not practical, for cost or manpower reasons, I find it helps to use a checklist when going over your publication that one last time. You can draw up your own checklist, based on your style sheet.
The biggest mistake when undertaking that final editorial check is to rely solely on the ubiquitous spellchecker.
People forget that the spellchecker will not catch broken links and similar. Nor will it find typos which happen to be proper words, e.g. "there" instead of "their" or "pot" instead of "post". So get a human involved too.
Go beyond grammar and spelling in your editorial check; here's a list of common points to get you started:
- spelling and grammar check.
- content check - do headings match the content? is all the content there? is anything repeated? Is anything left in from the last issue?
- are dates, titles and issue numbers correct?
- is the contact and administrative information up-to-date? (People invariably forget to update their copyright notice at the start of a new year.)
- do the links all work?
- are references (quotes etc.) correct?
- is the layout OK (see the relevant sections above?)
- will content and references still be relevant on publication? (Particularly important where a newsletter is set up well in advance and pre-scheduled. If you do finish your newsletters well in advance of the publication date, still check them over again close to publication. Recent events may have made some of the content irrelevant or even embarrassing.)
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