How to Become an Editor in Canada

Editing is a great career for self-motivated people who are both meticulous and deeply curious. But how do you become an editor in the first place? In Canada, there are a few routes you can take to an editorial career, involving a bachelor’s degree (or relevant work experience), continuing education programs and workshops, internships, and optional certification.

Training and Education for Editors in Canada

This is because, regardless of which degree you earn, you will need to take additional, specialized editorial training. Having a good grasp of the grammar taught in high school is not enough; you also need to master specific skill sets for each kind of writing you’ll be editing. A common choice for anyone who wants to work for a publishing house, magazine, or similar type of publication is to go on to college for a postgraduate publishing program. These programs, which are taught by industry professionals, offer a broad overview of the publishing industry, addressing editing, production, marketing, publicity, contracts, and more. Most of them include an internship as a requirement for graduation.

Postgraduate Publishing or Editing Programs in Canada

Simon Fraser University: Master of Publishing

This is Canada’s only master’s degree in publishing. It’s a sixteen-month full-time program at SFU’s Faculty of Communication, Art, and Technology in Burnaby, B.C. This degree has a more rigorously academic bent than the certificate programs below, and there’s an emphasis on students building up a professional-calibre portfolio of work.

Centennial College: Publishing—Book, Magazine and Electronic

This one-year (two semester) program is offered through the School of Communications, Media, Arts, and Design, located at the Story Arts Centre in Toronto (fun fact: this campus is where the television series Degrassi High was filmed between 1989 and 1991).

The Chang School of Continuing Education: Publishing Certificate

This flexible online program is offered course by course, so you can complete it over either one or two years. You can enter either with an undergraduate degree or as a mature student with “related professional experience and education.” The Chang School of Continuing Education is part of Toronto Metropolitan University.

Humber College: Creative Book Publishing

This is an accelerated online program that offers two semesters’ worth of learning in four months. Classes are five days a week and are paired with offline learning activities. In addition to training publishing professionals for traditional roles, this program also promotes itself to aspiring self-published authors.

George Brown College: Editorial Skills Program

This online certificate program focuses tightly on editorial skills, with courses on grammar, structural and stylistic editing, copyediting, proofreading, production editing, web content, and non-traditional content.

Université Laval: certificat en revision professionnelle

This two-semester French-language program, with six required courses and four of eighteen available electives, lets students shape their education to the specialties they wish to pursue.

Some people who don’t have bachelor’s degrees are able to enter the publishing industry by taking one of these certificate programs as a mature student, substituting their years of work experience for years of study.

Undergraduate Publishing Programs and Editing Courses in Canada

Some universities offer publishing-oriented programs as part of an undergraduate degree. These are always changing, so refer to Editors Canada’s list for the most up-to-date information.

Internships

Another option for getting hands-on training is to pursue an internship with a publishing house. This is a valuable way to gain an understanding of how publishing works in the real world, and to observe how in-house editors work. Interning at a small or mid-sized house can be especially beneficial, since you’ll have a chance to observe how different departments interact, and you will likely gain a wider variety of experience. There are, of course, equity-related problems associated with internships, and no one can deny that they have replaced too many entry-level positions. But the fact remains that having an internship on your resume is a huge benefit if you want to work in house at a publisher.

Unfortunately, with so many graduates from publishing programs seeking internships, it can be difficult to get a placement if you aren’t entering from a college or university program. There’s also the matter of securing housing and living costs while completing an internship that pays either nothing or very little. However, programs have been introduced at the national and (some) provincial levels to help publishers hire equity-seeking interns at minimum wage, which is a step in the right direction.

If you are hoping to land an internship without taking a program first, try getting involved in literary events and making some connections with professionals in the industry. You can also boost your resume by taking some workshops through Editors Canada (more on that below) or by emphasizing previous work experience involving books or literacy.

Editing Courses and Workshops

You can gain editing skills through workshops and courses offered by various institutions and organizations without needing to be an undergraduate or graduate student. Some highlights include:

• Editors Canada’s webinar catalogue
  • These webinars are discounted for members, but anyone can pay to attend one or purchase a recording. Topics range from improving specific technical skills to improving your business savvy as a freelancer.
• The Simon Fraser University Editing Certificate
  • This online program includes ten required courses and five electives, to be completed over two to five years.
• Mount Royal University Professional Editing Extension Certificate
  • This online course involves six required courses, for a total of one hundred hours. Completion time can vary from one to three years, depending on a student’s schedule.
• Southeast College’s The Keys to Effective Editing course
  • This six-week online course offers fundamental copyediting skills for fiction and nonfiction. 
• Individual “continuing education” or “extended learning” courses through colleges and universities. These may vary from year to year, but institutions known to offer them include:
  • The University of British Columbia
  • The University of Calgary

Certification

These credentials are not required to get work as an editor—in fact, it isn’t recommended that anyone take the exams until they have been working professionally for five years. But once you have them, you will be recognized as a master of your craft. Some employers and clients, including several provincial governments and NGOs, favour hiring editors with professional certification.

In order to prepare for the certification exams, you should study the Professional Editorial Standards and practice using test preparation guides. If you find external direction helpful, Queen’s University offers a continuing education certificate program centred around the Professional Editorial Standards, with five sixty-hour courses covering each area (including Copy Editing 1 and Copy Editing 2).  

Hard Skills Needed to Be an Editor

While excelling in the grammar lessons taught in high school and university is a good start for an editor, that alone isn’t enough to work as a professional. After all, there are a lot of grammar and spelling rules that are:

flexible…

The Jones’ baby
The Jones’s baby

Neither of these is incorrect, so who decides if a piece of writing uses one or the other?

…regional…

color/colour
realize/realise
“Watch out!” he said. / ‘Watch out!’ he said.

You probably know some regional variations between Canada, the United States, the UK, and Australia, but how complete is your knowledge?

…or dependent on situation.

Nine men went down into the mine.
There were 9 men in the mine that day.

Have you ever thought about when to use numerals and when to spell numbers out?

Many of them change with time.

1999: Internet 2024: internet
2005: e-mail 2024: email

Editors need to understand and consistently apply the writing and formatting standards set out in the style book appropriate to the publication they’re working on. For example, a trade book (the kind of fiction or nonfiction sold in ordinary bookstores) might follow the conventions of the Chicago Manual of Style. A Canadian magazine likely uses the Canadian Press Stylebook.

On top of those, a company that produces published content usually has its own in-house style guide, a document that clarifies standards that may add onto what their chosen style book states or, at times, overrule it. Editors need to know these books and documents intimately so that they can spot and correct anything that goes against them in the text they’re editing.

Additionally, editors today need sufficient computer skills to edit documents on screen. At the most basic level, this means using Track Changes in Microsoft Word, document markup in Adobe Acrobat, and/or Suggesting mode in Google Docs. For more complex publications, further mastery of the available tools is needed, such as using macros in Microsoft programs.

Many editors also benefit from learning some amount of text-design skills. Even if they aren’t finalizing designs themselves, understanding the designer’s needs will help them streamline their communications with their colleagues and to do a better job at refining the text for its final purpose.

Soft Skills Needed to Be an Editor

In either case, the editor needs to master the art of guiding authors toward beneficial rewrites without making them feel attacked or implementing high-handed changes. A healthy dose of humility is also helpful, especially when the author is a subject-matter expert. Well-worded queries (“My fact-checking turned up X where you mentioned Y. Can you verify if I understood the context correctly?”) will yield results without getting anyone’s back up.

Other traits an editor needs are:

• The ability to focus on a text and absorb what they read
• A good memory for details
• For copy editors and proofreaders, meticulousness in noting things like spellings, place names, and timelines, and in checking for inconsistencies
• For substantive and stylistic editors, the ability to see the big picture of a text and envision how its audience will interact with it
• For production editors, managing editors, and anyone overseeing a team, organization and delegation skills for project management

Curious about how editors work with their clients? Everyone is unique, but you can read about my process in detail here.