Advanced Copy-Editing

How the course is delivered

The course consists of four sessions, each a mixture of delivery and interaction using Zoom breakout rooms and other online tools. There will be 15-minute breaks between sessions with the opportunity to do exercises and take a break. The course will run on the same day across two weeks, split into two half-day sessions in the morning from 9am to 12.30pm.

You will need to activate a free Zoom account to join the course. This takes two minutes and does not require any payment. It is purely for administrative purposes.

Any information to be completed beforehand will be sent via email.

Accessibility

Please contact us at with any accessibility or special requirements, for example having in-session captions or the learning materials sent to you in advance.

If you have any concerns about technical requirements or access please contact us on or telephone (+44) 020 8874 2718.

In-house training

This course is also available for in-company training, either virtually or in person at your office. Course content is tailored to suit your requirements. Group sizes range from five to twelve attendees. To find out more, email or telephone +44 (0)20 8874 2718.

Delegate feedback

“I very much enjoyed the course, particularly the focus on sharing our approaches to each piece. It’s really interesting to see how my most talented colleagues tackle challenging texts!” Imagine Learning delegate

“There were some very helpful bitesized takeaways … it was great to have the opportunity to work with fellow delegates, especially in a small group.” Editor, Class Publishing

“The handouts were incredibly useful, and I will make use of these in my work.” Production Editor, The Open University

“I thought the training was great ... I really enjoyed it and there was so much valuable insight and discussion.” Senior Editor, Class Professional Publishing

About the tutors

After an early career in teaching, educational research and educational publishing, Andrew Steeds went freelance, setting up Simply Put, a company focused on making unnecessarily complicated documents clearer and more accessible, in terms of both how they are written and how they are designed. For Simply Put, he works on his own, with designers and with others to support clients to communicate more clearly and more efficiently with their readers.

Andrew has been running courses for the PTC for 25 years. His main focus is on editorial activity, but he has an equal interest in the process of writing and the presentation skills of grammar and punctuation. Essential Grammar, an e-learning module, has had over 2,000 student enrolments since its launch in 2017.

In an in-house career that took her to Berlin, London, Oxford and Cambridge, Caroline Drake worked on a wide range of academic books, journals and illustrated trade titles. She was trained at Blackwell and Cambridge University Press, where, as senior subeditor then copy-editorial manager, she in turn trained copy-editors and proofreaders for fifteen years. She updated Butcher’s Copy-editing, with a colleague, for the fourth edition.

Now freelance, Caroline enjoys helping authors to get things right, first time. She has created and taught courses for a variety of clients, including publishers, educational organisations, the CIEP (formerly the SfEP), the reporters of the Scottish Parliament and the Parliamentary Research Service at the House of Commons.

Since 1999, Sarah Sodhi has proofed, tagged, bound, corrected, edited, managed, commissioned, subbed, scheduled, estimated and produced a great deal of content – from interactive, multi-media resources to marketing leaflets, from monthly magazines to 900-page medical tomes.

Starting her career at a small medical publisher in Oxford, Sarah produced medical textbooks, journals and a bi-monthly magazine. She then moved into the public sector to work for an adult education charity, introducing formal scheduling procedures, progress-chasing systems and detailed budgets. After this, she immersed herself in the education sector, editing and managing digital and print resources for primary, secondary and adult education publishers.

Caroline Knight began her career in publishing at Penguin Books in 1989, when she joined Editorial 2, the department dedicated to copy-editing. She has been a PTC tutor since 1996 and a freelancer since 2010.

Caroline became managing editor of Allen Lane The Penguin Press in 1995 before moving to Weidenfeld & Nicolson Illustrated in 1997. She lived in Greece, working freelance and tutoring at the PTC, from 2000 to 2003, when she became managing editorial director at William Heinemann, an imprint of the Random House group. Five years later, she moved to Atlantic Books, where she stayed until 2010 when she moved to rural Kent and rejoined the freelance community.

She has worked with Alastair Campbell, Vince Cable, David Willetts, Margaret Drabble and the late Herman Leonard, as well as a wide variety of others less famous. She enjoys editing both fiction and non-fiction, with a leaning towards history and politics. She lives on the edge of the North Downs with her husband, three children, a dog, six hens and tens of thousands of bees.

Related courses

The PTC offers virtual classroom courses, self-study distance-learning courses, and a range of e-learning modules. See below for those that complement or build on this course.  

Virtual classroom courses

• Copyright - the basics
• Editorial Project Management   
• Grammar and punctuation - the basics
• How to mark up PDFs with Adobe Acrobat
• Introduction to Editorial Skills
• Line-editing workshop
• Progress in Editorial Skills
• Publishing Strategy Toolkit
• Rewriting and Substantive Editing
• The Fundamentals of Public Speaking
• Working with Authors

Distance-learning courses

• Essential Copy-editing
• Essential Grammar
• Essential Proofreading
• Successful Editorial Freelancing

e-Learning modules

• A commissioning editor’s guide to working with authors
• A copy-editor’s guide to working with authors
• An editor's guide to author queries
• An editor's guide to editing fiction
• An editor's guide to editing illustrations
• An editor's guide to editing references
• An editor's guide to editorial style
• Essential copyright for publishers
• Essential editorial project management
• Proofreading PDFs: A complete guide for editors