Commenting on a final draft:
Basic copyediting
New authors can be uncomfortable about sending out their work. Our job in
commenting on a final draft, therefore, is to provide our colleagues with
grounds for confidence that they haven't made any stupid mistakes. To this
end, you should go over your colleague's final draft in great detail, line
by line, and notice all of the little problems that a faster reading can
miss. Although this process is called copyediting, the term is often abused.
Copyediting is a profession with its own skills and traditions, and we are not
copyeditors any more than we are plumbers. In particular, copyeditors have
an elaborate system of coded marks that I won't try to teach. Even so, we
can do our best on an amateur basis. The most prominent book on copyediting
is Claire Kehrwald Cook's very worthwhile "Line by Line: How to Edit Your
Own Writing", Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1985. It is sometimes listed as "The
MLA's Line by Line".
Publishers distinguish between "light" and "heavy" copyediting, depending on how much rewriting the copyeditor does. For a final draft, after many revisions, light-to-medium copyediting will probably suffice.
Some copyediting tasks are obvious, if arduous. Check the author's spelling, whether by software or by hand. Notice any words that might not be used correctly and look them up. Watch for grammatical mistakes. Verbs, for example, often fail to agree in number with their subjects when a subordinate phrase separates them ("Rufus, who uses a knife to slay dragons, eat dinner with a fork.").
Watch for editing errors -- the kinds of errors that happen when rewriting a sentence, such as words in the wrong order or fragments that make no sense. Something in our brains is willing to edit out small bits of nonsense without drawing them to our attention. That's why you need to read the manuscript carefully, almost clinically, line by line.
Authors can also overlook errors that cross line breaks. For example, if same word might appear at the end of one line and the beginning of the next line, our brains might filter it out.
Watch for words -- not short function words but substantive words like nouns, verbs, and adjectives -- that are used for two different purposes in the same stretch of prose. Not only is this distracting, but it can stretch the reader's brain to keep track of the differences... Observe that I have just used the word "stretch" for two different purposes. And indeed, most readers will find this jarring. It's as if the lexical item "stretch" has one single center in the brain, and once it is assigned a role in comprehending a text, it has no room for other roles -- unless, that is, the author is consciously trying to make a joke and structuring the text and its meaning accordingly.
Copyeditors can watch out for poetic problems such as unwanted alliteration. Notice, for example, that the phrase "poetic problems" contains two words, both of which begin with the "p" phoneme. That's alliteration. The problem here is not the spelling -- the word "phrase" begins with the letter "p" but does not collide with "poetic" and "problems" because its beginning phoneme is "f". Alliteration is a structure -- a poetic structure -- and like all structures it should be used only by choice and not by accident. The only test is subjective: does it sound good? Alliterations that do sound good can be effective rhetorically. For example, the last sentence of one of my papers includes the phrase "a near-total renegotiation of the mechanisms and mediations of our lives". The drama of this phrase derives in part from the alliteration of the words "mechanisms" and "mediations". Other accidental poetic structures, such as rhymes, can be distracting as well, and the author will be the last person to notice them.
Point out excessively complicated sentences. You needn't rewrite them at this point -- the author should know how. Point out anything clumsy -- anything that holds up the smooth flow of reading. It's time to work out the lumps so that the essay is ready to go.