Copy Editing for Fiction Writers

Barbara Daniels

1. Check to be sure you’ve indented consistently for each new speaker and each new paragraph.
2. Use “ ” marks when you mention a short story title within a paragraph. (This is MLA form.) Use the naked title when it heads your story. Underline or use italics for book titles.
3. Use commas when you address someone: “Do what I say, you little punk, before I decide your jacket would look good on my brother.” “Joe, don’t touch him.”
4. Capitalize Mom when it’s used as a name: “Tell Mom I’ll call,” but “I told my mom I’d call.”
5. Use a comma after a long introductory clause: “Because Mom never calls me, I call her every day.” If the dependent clause ends the sentence, you don’t need the comma: “I always call Mom because she never calls me.”
6. Don’t use a comma before “and” when you’re not joining two long complete sentences or listing three or more items. Not: “I called Mom, and after awhile called Lu.” Not: “I fed the cat, and the dog.”
7. Don’t put a comma between your subject and verb even if you hear a pause. Not:

“The love she’d felt for George when she was thirteen, embarrassed her now.” Try leaving commas out unless you’re sure they’re needed.

8. To catch unintentional sentence fragments, read your sentences out of order. In other words, read the last sentence first, then the second to the last sentence and so on.
9. “However” doesn’t link sentences. Use a period or semicolon (;) before it if you’re connecting two complete sentences: “I worked hard on my folder; however, some of the required work is missing.” If you’re using “however” in a story, reconsider it. You may be better off with the more informal “but.”
10. The semicolon goes in lists only if they’re already divided by commas: The class elected Darcy, president; Bob, vice president; Beth, secretary; and James, treasurer. This will rarely come up in your fiction.
11. “Like” is a subordinating conjunction only in informal writing. Not: “She looked like she was going to burst into tears.” Instead, use “as if” in formal writing.
12. A participial phrase needs to be next to the word it describes. Not: “Running across the campus, a twenty dollar bill was found.” Use commas to set off participial phrases.
13. Read to the left of an apostrophe to see the word that states the possessor: “the boy’s books,” “the boys’ books.”
14. Move “ marks to the right places, and the curly quotation marks should turn in the right direction automatically.
15. Double check easily confused words: it’s / its, their / they’re, your / you’re.
16. Look at “just,” “so,” and “very” to see if your sentences are stronger without them.