(10-03-2026, 10:27 AM)Kilroy Wrote: I have for the last little while been making typographical corrections to a story I downloaded from a site for my own use. The original had many, many such errors since the author used a phone's keyboard to do their text entry.
I have no plans to repost the corections, but I do have a question I would like people's opinions on: when does such correction becomes actual copyediting?
Along with mispellings I have been changing word forms when I thought the writer used the wrong form (using a verb as a noun or adjective as adverb, for example.) I am not any sort of expert in grammar and usage, just a reader.
Also, does anyone have ideas as to how much editing should be done in dialogue specifically? My thought has been that characters should be allowed to make usage errors if it is part of their personality.
Kilroy
Yes, that's certainly editing.
Naming no names, I'm doing much the same when I edit for another writer who was having issues with tenses and sustained abuse of the word "had". (They're doing much better and grammatical boundaries are responding well to counselling.)
I also spent a few days rewording a downloaded webnovel, but I think that was because of sloppy (possibly AI) translations of the original from Chinese. Certain names for people and projects were inconsistent and gendered pronouns were often wrong (to be fair, it was a male to female bodyswap story so sometimes those were contextually mixed up for the male lead in the female lead or vice versa).