Immersive Worldbuilding through Copyediting

Worldbuilding often comes down the everyday details for the characters. Copyediting choices like capitalization, italics, and more can support your epic worldbuilding or undermine it and keep your reader at arm’s length. I put together a one-hour webinar (together with the American Copy Editors Society) to teach authors (and editors) how to better invite readers to see the world through a character’s eyes.

Worldbuilding Language Details

In this webinar, I don’t just discuss “correct” ways to treat invented terms, species, and items. I also talk about considering these worldbuilding elements from the view of your characters so you can better convey the characters’ relationship with those things to your readers. Because as cool as worldbuilding can be, it’s even cooler to see interesting characters interacting with that world!

The two things I discuss most in the webinar are capitalization and italic text, both of which I see overused a lot. I think some of this can come from some authors’ lack of confidence in themselves and their readers, so in the webinar I talk about ways to determine if something needs capitals or italics based on the way characters interact with that thing and how often a reader is going to interact with it.

Access the Webinar

The full webinar—including not only my prepared presentation but also a great Q&A from the ACES audience—is available through The ACES Academy. The ACES Academy makes online training and skill-building for editors more accessible for busy working editors (learn more about the academy here). Although the classes are focused on editors, many of them include principles that help authors make their work shine even before an editor touches it.

The webinar is free for ACES members and $30 for anyone else. You can register for the webinar here. It’s available on demand, anytime you need it. And if you want to discuss it afterward (since you don’t get the live Q&A access), comment below with any questions, chat with me on Twitter, or contact me through Looseleaf’s form.