If you have a good eye for detail and a good handle on the English language, you can help out by copyediting! This involves a review of the spelling, punctuation, grammar and overall style. Follow this procedure to improve the quality of a wikiHow article:
Edit Steps
- 1Click on the "Edit" tab at the top of any article. A great place to begin is our list of articles in need of copyediting. You can also use the search function to find poorly written pages. Good search terms might be:
- ect. -- common misspelling of etc.
- "could of" (should of/would of) -- Common misspelling of "could have" unless there's a punctuation mark between the two words. (You could, of course, make ...)
- "then" -- frequently used when "than" is the more appropriate word.
- dont, cant, thats -- contracted words that are missing an apostrophe.
- they're, their and there; your and you're -- similar words that are often confused. Check whether the article uses the right one.
- ur, u -- text speak should be avoided.
- artical -- common misspelling of article.
- Emoticons such as :),XD,and :D and so on.
- 2Review for spelling errors. The most important thing to remember here is that our contributors come from all over the world, and they may spell words differently than you do (e.g. color/colour, theater/theatre, jewelry/jewellry). If the same spelling is used throughout the page, it never hurts to check to see if it's the British or Australian spelling of the same word. If it is, don't "correct" it! With that in mind, here are some spell checking tools you can use:
- Use Spell Check features, such as in Microsoft Word or Mozilla Firefox.
- Review for commonly misspelled words.
- Avoid ALL CAPS, chat shorthand and emoticons.
- 3Review for punctuation errors:
- Use a period (.) at the end of a sentence to denote a full stop.
- Use a colon (:) to introduce a list.
- Use double quotation marks (") to quote a person or another piece of literature.
- Use a comma (,) to denote a break or pause within a sentence.
- Use a comma between a series of items within a sentence.
- Use a comma between two or more descriptive adjectives.
- 4Review for grammatical errors:
- When possible, use active rather than passive sentences.
- Use Generic Pronouns so that both male and female readers feel that the article applies to them.
- 5Remove personal reference. The reason we avoid this is because personal reference tends to discourage people from editing a page. Try to replace the words "I, my, me" with "you, your".
- 6Fix capitalization errors. Note that if there's a chunk of text written in all caps, you can convert it all to lower case (or have only the first letter of every word capitalized) easily in most word processing programs. In MS Word, for example, press Shift + F3 for all lowercase, and press it again for first letter capitalization. Fixing the text from that is usually less time-consuming than rewriting it.
- 7Click on Preview, at the bottom of the article, to review your changes.
- 8If the article has a {{copyedit}} tag at the beginning, remove it. This will take the article off the list of articles in need of copyediting. If there are other templates there, don't remove them unless you've fixed whatever issue that template is addressing. If in doubt, leave them in place to be removed by another editor.
- 9Write a note in the Edit Summary, at the bottom of the article, to clarify your edit. Something simple like "copyediting", or abbreviated "ce" will do the trick! It lets people know what you did for the page when they glance at the page history.
- 10Click on Publish, at the bottom of the article, to save your changes.
Edit Tips
- For questions, contact the Help Team.
- While on an Edit Page, click on Show Changes at the bottom of the article.
- The left column is original text. The right column is your version.
- Yellow text has been deleted.
- Green text has been added.
- Red text indicates changes that have been made.
Edit Related wikiHows
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Here is a list of suggested articles that have not yet been written. You can help by researching and writing one of these articles. To get started writing one of these articles, click on the red link of a title below.
Article Info
Last edited:
September 5, 2011 by Krystle
Categories:
Writing and Editing
Recent edits by: Tiagoroth, Taronna McKee, Kanhu (see all)
