“Essentials of Language Editing” – as the name indicates – covers the most basic topics that will help you initiate your editing career. The course contains four modules: grammar and usage, punctuation, basics of style editing (such as the use of numerals and formatting), MS Word features for editors and mentoring.

Being instructor-led, this course will need 3 months to complete.

Largely no. The course is structured as modules, lessons, topics, practice quizzes, and assessments and is available in our learning portal that you can access at your convenient time. However, there will be periodical live sessions, which will usually fall on weekends or holidays. During these live sessions, we will discuss any questions you may have, not only from the topics you learned but also on copyediting career in general.

Yes – a big YES! The course in intuitively structured so that you get plenty of editing practice and are confident about copyediting a manuscript at the end of the training programme. Here is how the course is designed:

1. 1. Each module (which may be considered a standalone mini course) is divided into lessons and topics.
   2. Practice papers follow each topic to reinforce learning – for example, you learn a few rules and keep practising to master it.
   3. Practice papers at the end of each lesson provide you practice on editorial decision-making – for example, you are given a set of sentences that is a mix of the topics covered in that lesson, which provide you the practice to pick the correct rule to apply.

In these two cases, you know something is wrong, possibly where the error is too. Thus, these quizzes provide you with practice for mastery of the associated topic.

1. 4. Each module has sample passages at its end. At this level, you are not presented with sentences with errors, but a regular passage that you will edit – you analyse what is right and what is wrong and apply the relevant learning.
   5. On completion of the grammar & usage, punctuation and style editing modules, you enter the mentoring period. During this phase, you edit around 15 sample passages covering humanities and social sciences (HSS) and STEM background. Thus, by the time you complete the training, you would have edited around 30 sample passages.

Thus your learning shapes up so beautifully that you won’t even recognize that you are ready for editing.

You start editing passages from week 1! Editing passages is not reserved for the end. As and when you master a topic, you edit a passage too. The course has as many as 25 sample passages for editing. At the end of the training, you are familiar with the academic style of writing, will have mastered the basic concepts for light editing and will be confident about editing live.

Let me first tell you that this course specializes in academic editing, which is dominated by STM (scientific, technical and medical) publications. Everyday-English examples would be a great idea to explain concepts, but you will end up looking at a completely different way of writing in academic works. So the course uses a very minimal level of examples from everyday English and extensively uses example sentences and practice papers from academic works. This approach introduces you, the learner, to academic writing style. By the time you complete the training, you would have practised more than 1000 sentences and become familiar to this writing style. Thus, you will not be baffled by a sudden shift in the writing style if it were all everyday English examples.

As of now, there are no video lessons. While some modules may have, mostly this is not video-based teaching-learning. Learning materials are available as modules, topics, practice quizzes and assessments.

Yes, you do. Not just at the end of the course, but at the end of every module. As and when you successfully complete a module, you earn a course certificate. Every accomplishment needs to be honoured and celebrated – why wait until the end? It is a good idea to flaunt each of your accomplishment, so recruiters and prospective clients know that you are serious and systematic!