Copyediting and the fact-checking process

Denise and Louise talk to Laura Poole, a professional copyeditor who specializes in working with university presses on scholarly non-fiction, mainly in the humanities. Laura discusses the importance of fact checking.

Listen to find out more about:

• What a copyediting service includes
• When fact checking takes place in the editorial process
• Fiction: place names, historical accuracy, idiom, dates, etymology
• Non-fiction: people names, obscure terms, place names, dates, protecting author reputation
• Differences between spot checking and fact checking
• Fact checking for consistency across series
• Print versus digital: preventing reputational damage in the long term
• Tools for fact checking
• Who’s responsible for fact checking?
• Effective and sensitive querying of facts in non-fiction
• Artistic licence with facts in fiction

Mentioned in the show:

• Laura Poole, Archer Editorial: https://www.sfep.org.uk/directory/laura-poole and https://www.linkedin.com/in/laurapoole/
• Tool: Internet Movie Database (IMDb): https://www.imdb.com/
• Tool: The Historical Thesaurus of English: https://ht.ac.uk/
• Tool: Google Ngram Viewer: https://books.google.com/ngrams
• Tool: CIA – The World Factbook: https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/
• Tool: The New Food Lover's Companion (Barron's Cooking Guide)
• Tool: The Art of Firearms in Fiction: https://www.louiseharnbyproofreader.com/the-art-of-firearms-in-fiction.html

Denise and Louise

• Denise Cowle Editorial Services (non-fiction)
• Louise Harnby | Proofreader & Copyeditor (fiction)

Music credit

‘Vivacity’ Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com). Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/