While not all documents contain these components, academic documents (student essays and dissertations, research papers, and scholarly books) contain many of these, and, in particular, references.
The copy editor’s job is to check these elements. The designing and proofreading will have been done already, unless your client has asked you to proofread too.
As with text and design, all these elements will have to be set up and checked according to a particular style guide.
If you find you are checking something but are not in possession of the style guide, or there isn’t one, or if you find that you don’t have the rest of the document to work with, just check for consistency and usability. However, do try to obtain the style guide if possible, or draw up a few essential points based on elements you have found in the text, and ask for your client’s agreement before you start work.
The actual text in any of these elements will follow the text style guide that you would have used to do your copy editing, unless otherwise stated in your brief.
Footnotes
Footnotes are notes that appear at the bottom of a page in a book or a document, beneath the main text. They are flagged by a superscript number, for example, 1 which follows the portion of text to which they refer.
There are two distinct purposes of footnotes. They can be used:
- To explain or elaborate on a point without blocking up the text with additional material, or
- As references, to identify either the source of literary material cited in the text or supplementary sources for the reader to study.
A general footnote might give further details of a subject’s life (dates, place of birth, etc), or explain a point in the text.
The copy editor’s job is to check that:
- The number of each footnote corresponds with the superscript number set within the main body of text on the page.
- Each footnote contains the correct text and that the text is free of typos and style errors.
- The numbers are in the correct order.
- The footnotes have been set in the correct font, size, style, alignment, etc, and appear at the bottom of the correct page.
See our proofreading course