Mediabistro Self-Paced Courses: Learning for the independent-minded. No teachers, no fellow students. Just a rich multimedia curriculum designed to teach you what you need to know.

DETAILS

Find out how to pass edit tests, fact check, and launch your career as a copy editor. You'll learn how to resolve punctuation issues, spot and correct common errors, and craft elegant sentences. You'll also discover how to adapt your resume to land work as a freelancer or full-time staffer.

Assignments include copy editing newspaper stories, magazine features, press releases, marketing materials, online copy, and fiction.

In this class, you will learn how to:

• Understand grammar, in-house style, and the work flow of a copy editor
• Identify an em dash, en dash, and appropriate hyphen usage
• Identify and correct commonly misused words, agreement, parallelism, capitalization, and headline style
• Fix modifier issues like dangling participles, modifier placement, and antecedent problems
• Appropriately use a semicolon, period, colon, ellipsis, exclamation point, question mark, and single quotes

Check out the complete syllabus.

The self-paced course includes:

• A video introduction from Mediabistro copy editing instructor Cheryl Della Pietra
• 11 written lessons 
• 11 resource lists
• 12 copy tests and answer keys
• 8 supplemental videos on proofreading marks and queries, fact-checking, electronic editing and track changes, and life as a copy editor 

By the end of this course, you will have:
Experience copy editing with both AP Style and The Chicago Manual of Style and experience copy editing seven kinds of manuscripts (fiction excerpt, medical text, press release, newspaper story, academic text, online story, and magazine feature).

How the self-paced classroom works:

• You have access to the course platform for three months. Please note, if you sign up after 6 pm ET Monday-Friday, your email invitation will be sent the following business day. 
• Mediabistro's education team is available to answer your questions.
• There are no other students and no instructor. Students are invited to post comments on our community forum of media professionals to interact with others in the field.