Editing for education.

Educational publishers need to ensure the content of their textbooks is correct, meets their budget and is appealing to teachers and students alike. Working with educational publishers can range from making sure that the answers in the worked solutions match the answers in the back of the chapter to checking that the photo labelled in the caption as a tick really is a tick and not a mite. Textbook editors might also check that there aren’t twenty photos of koalas in a new science textbook.

I have over ten years of freelance and in-house experience in working with primary, secondary and tertiary educational publishers on materials ranging from textbooks, worksheets, worked solutions and presentations, to videos and trial exams. My experience includes print, ebooks and digital learning platforms.

I have worked on textbooks for Australia, the US and Papua New Guinea.

Case study.

Front cover of Oxford textbook Biology for Queensland Units 3 & 4

Oxford University Press.

Copyediting.

I was engaged by the publisher to style and copyedit the textbook manuscript. This involved working directly with the authors on a daily basis, resolving queries directly with them and reviewing all of my proposed edits. Rewriting the definitions of glossary terms was also required, as well as photo research.

The manuscript drew heavily upon a previous version of the textbook, and information in the manuscript had to be checked very closely for scientific accuracy. The understanding of the scientific concepts covered in the curriculum had been updated, and in some cases changed, since the previous version of the textbook. For example, scientific names had to be verified as some of the animals had been reclassified due to developments in the fields of genetics and evolution.

All the diagrams in the textbook were redrawn, requiring me to write detailed artwork briefs for each one and edit the artwork at each iteration to ensure the diagrams were correct. A consistent colour scheme for DNA, RNA and associated nucleobases, sugar and phosphate was implemented across all of the diagrams to help student understanding.