Activities depend on experience and whether you work in-house or freelance. They may include:

• correcting spelling mistakes and grammatical errors
• sub-editing text written by a number of authors to ensure consistent house style
• working with IT-based publishing systems and databases, as well as via the internet or from paper manuscripts
• liaising regularly with authors and publishers by phone and email
• checking that authors have provided all the required materials and paperwork
• resolving queries directly with the author, such as style and text inconsistencies
• coding manuscripts for design features, such as hierarchy of headings, to instruct the production team
• creating artwork briefs to detail the content of illustrations
• ensuring that illustrations are correctly captioned and referred to in the text
• producing or working to a style checklist to ensure consistency in hyphenation, capitalisation, formatting of references, etc
• maintaining awareness of new words or phrases coming into popular usage with a view to ensuring they're appropriate for the readership
• discussing and resolving any potentially libellous sections with the commissioning editor and author
• retrieving articles from archives and rearranging within publications
• preparing preliminary pages for the title, contents and preface of a publication
• overseeing the work of indexers, typesetters and designers
• typesetting and designing layout (increasingly for freelancers)
• ensuring that publications are prepared on budget and to schedule
• managing marketing and business activities (for those who are self-employed).