General Proofreading + Grammar Refresher: courses for editors

Metalinguistic awareness—the fancy term for a person’s ability to consciously reflect on the nature of language—is essential to those of us who work with words. Wordsmiths should always be learning. It takes a posture of humility, active engagement, and plenty of practice to master skills. That’s why specialized training, ongoing education, and shiny new certificates are a few of my favorite things.

I’ve taken two courses this year to sharpen my editing skills that I’m quite pleased with.

The first was a course in General Proofreading from Proofread Anywhere. This course offered hands-on practice in the major types of errors that proofreaders need to catch, including capitalization, apostrophes, hyphens, semicolons, commas, subject/verb agreement, question marks, italics, noun/pronoun agreement, numbers, commonly misused words, and American vs. British spelling variations.

As part of this training, I proofed fifty practice essays in different genres on a variety of topics. I completed additional practice workouts offered by the Chicago Manual of Style to deepen my familiarity with this style guide. It was an excellent investment and has been a source of networking and industry knowledge, to boot. To earn my certificate, a 90% or above on the course exam was required.

Behold, my beautiful certificate.

The second worthwhile course I took this year was Grammar Lion’s Grammar Refresher. Deepening my knowledge of grammar behooves me as an editor and a teacher of English. This course covers:

• parts of speech
• mixed up words
• contractions and possessives
• subjects and predicates
• sentence fragments
• run-on sentences
• standard verb forms
• pronouns
• agreement
• shifts in person, tense and structure
• clarity, concision, diction and logic
• capitalization and punctuation

I really appreciated instructor Ellen Feld’s accessible way of presenting these concepts with clarity.

I recommend both of these courses for writers and editors.

Have you taken any good courses lately? I’d love to hear about them.