Advanced Copy-Editing

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.