Practical Processes in Proofreading

A growing number of people today are paying for editing and proofreading services. However, very few people know about the practical processes involved in professional proofreading and editing.

While proofreading and editing services are affordable for many students, academics, and businesses, the reason they are often priced higher than newcomers would think is due to the complexity of the tasks involved in preparing a manuscript for publication.

For example, the time-consuming nature of proofreading and editing partly account for the pricing of these services. Another contributing factor is the educational background of the proofreader.

An especially important factor that feeds into the pricing of these services, as mentioned above, is the issue of the processes involved. In this article, then, some of these processes are described to help you better understand what proofreading and editing actually involve.

 

1. On-screen editing with paper proofreading

Professional editors and proofreaders know all about the practice of editing using a computer screen and then using a hardcopy for proofreading.

For complicated reasons, our brains and eyes simply do not notice words and letters on computer screens particularly well.

By contrast, when errors are printed onto a page, they seem to jump up and become immediately obvious, even to the untrained eye. This is one of the reasons why you often find spelling errors in many printed books.

For this reason, once the more complicated process of editing has been completed on screen, professional proofreaders print out the document and work on it on paper.

 

2. Follow a one-at-a-time mindset

A professional editor or proofreader knows that it is futile to try to find and solve every problem in a manuscript in one pass. This is because it is difficult for us to keep track of an extensive list of proofreading and editing issues and categories.

For this reason, professionals go through a manuscript on several passes, each time looking for a specific issue (e.g., punctuation on the first pass, wordiness on the second pass, and style on the third).

When you use this approach, you can keep your mind focused as a proofreader or editor. Conversely, if you try to find every single error at the same time, there is a high likelihood that you will miss some errors.

 

3. Work with a style guide from the beginning

Rather than writing your document and then consulting a style guide to fix it once it’s finished, you can save a lot of time by working with a style guide from the beginning. Professional proofreaders and editors commonly follow this process of working with a style guide from the outset.

 

4. Don’t use full justification

If you decide to proofread and edit your manuscript using a computer monitor and a word processor, you should avoid using full justification for your text.

The reason why it is a common practice among professional editors and proofreaders to avoid fully justified text is because this makes it harder to find specific types of errors (e.g., extra spaces).

 

5. Syllable-level rather than word-level checking

When an untrained proofreader checks a sentence, they tend to read it through word by word. By contrast, the process that a professional adopts involves syllable by syllable checking.

The reason for this is that for longer words, which may contain three or four syllables, your eyes will tend to skip over (or compress) each of the syllables. This makes it difficult to spot errors that may occur in the middle of the word.