Give the copyeditor a cleaner manuscript plus any style-sheet decisions that emerged from continuity review.
Before copyedit
Run a continuity check before copyedit
Use a continuity pass before copyediting so sentence-level polish does not lock in story-level contradictions.
Timing
Why this moment matters
Copyediting is most efficient when the manuscript's facts, order, and unresolved story promises are already stable.
Checks
Checks to prioritize
Focus on the continuity categories that affect this handoff most.
- Chronology, travel, and recovery time
- Character facts, names, titles, and forms of address
- World terminology and invented terms
- Setup/payoff and unresolved references
Steps
Suggested workflow
A simple sequence for turning continuity findings into useful revision decisions.
01
Stabilize the story
Resolve continuity findings that would require paragraph or scene changes.
02
Capture style decisions
Record final spellings, titles, ranks, capitalization, and invented terms.
03
Then copyedit
Move to sentence-level consistency after the larger story facts are settled.
Boundary
What this is not for
Wise Wombat is a focused diagnostic tool, so it should sit beside the right human or editorial process.
- Grammar and usage correction
- House style enforcement
- Replacing a professional copyeditor
Related
Related reading
More detail on this workflow and the checks behind it.