Consistency editing

What consistency editing is

Consistency editing makes a document agree with itself. Every name spelled one way, every product called one thing, capitals applied by one rule, numbers and dates and units formatted the same throughout, hyphens where the document has decided they go. It is the most mechanical edit I sell and the easiest to check afterwards, because every decision is written down and either applied everywhere or not.

It is a specialist pass, bought on its own, carved out of a larger job. Consistency is part of copyediting, so if you are buying a copyedit you are already buying this. Buy it separately when the document is otherwise fine and the only problem is that four people wrote it. It is not line editing and does not touch rhythm or voice, it is not structural editing and moves nothing, and it is not a proofread: it will fix "e-mail" against "email" across 80 pages and walk straight past a missing word in a sentence where every term was already right.

It is also not fact-checking. If the warranty is described as ten years on page four and twelve on page nineteen, I flag the disagreement and ask you which is true. I do not decide. Tracing claims to sources is fact-checking and it is a different service.

When you need one

When several people wrote parts of one document, which is nearly always the case with capability statements, annual reports, tender responses and staff handbooks. Each author is internally consistent and none of them agree with each other, and the join shows to exactly the reader you were hoping to impress.

The second case is a set of documents rather than one: a website, a proposal template and a brochure that all describe the same products and all describe them differently. Consistency work across a set is worth more than within one document, because that is where customers notice.

The third is a rebrand, a product rename, or a legal-entity change, where one term has to be replaced everywhere, including in the places it appears in a slightly different form that a find-and-replace will miss.

You do not need this if the document has broader problems. If the sentences also need correcting, buy the copyedit and get consistency as part of it rather than paying twice. If the writing sounds like four different people as well as spelling things four different ways, consistency work will not fix that; line editing or voice alignment is the honest answer.

What gets checked

• Names. The business, its legal suffix, its divisions, its products, its people and their job titles. Client and partner names too, which are the ones that cause offence when wrong.
• Capitals. Whether your services, departments and job titles take a capital, and whether the rule is followed after a colon, in headings and in bullet lists. Capitals drift faster than anything else in a document.
• Numbers, dates and units. When figures are words and when they are digits, how ranges and currency are written, one date format throughout, and metric or imperial applied by a stated rule rather than by whoever wrote the paragraph.
• Terms and spelling. One word, two words or hyphenated. Canadian spelling applied consistently. The term chosen for each concept and used for it every time, instead of three synonyms used to avoid repetition.
• Formatting conventions. How lists are punctuated, how headings are capitalised, how quotations and citations are handled, how figures and tables are labelled and referred to.

What you get

The style sheet. The real deliverable. One to three pages listing every decision made and the form settled on, alphabetically, in a table you can hand to the next writer. Where a decision was yours rather than mine, it says so. This document is the start of a style guide: most businesses that end up with one get there because a style sheet arrived and turned out to be the thing they had been missing.

The corrected document. Tracked changes, so you can see the 200 small fixes, plus a clean version ready to use.

The queries. The disagreements only you can settle, such as which of two warranty terms is correct or which product name is the current one. Listed with page references and a one-line question each.

A worked example

An illustration, not a client. A Manitoba manufacturer of grain-handling equipment has a 60-page dealer manual, a 12-page brochure and 30 web pages, all written over five years by three staff and one departed contractor. The flagship auger line appears as "GrainFlow", "Grain Flow", "Grainflow" and, twice, "GF Series". Dates appear in three formats. Capacities are in bushels in one document and tonnes in another, with no conversion given.

The consistency pass runs across all three sets together, which is the only way it is worth doing. It produces a style sheet of 74 entries and about 400 individual changes, 60 of them the product name. Nine queries go back, the important one being whether the discontinued GF Series is the same machine under an old name. The manufacturer answers, the decision is recorded, and every document now uses one name. Nothing was rewritten and nothing was reordered. A dealer comparing the brochure with the manual no longer wonders whether they are looking at two products.

How it runs

1. A half-hour call. What the documents are, how many there are, and whether consistency alone is what you need. No charge.
2. A fixed price in writing. Based on total word count and the number of separate documents, agreed before I start.
3. You send everything that has to agree. All of it, not a sample. Any existing style guide, term list or brand rules come too, and if there is a dispute about a term, tell me who decides.
4. The pass. One read to build the style sheet, one to apply it, one to verify. Two to five working days for most sets.
5. Delivery. Style sheet first, so you can overrule any decision before it is applied, then the corrected documents.

What it costs

Consistency editing is quoted as a fixed price in CAD after the half-hour call. It costs less per page than a copyedit because it is one pass with a checkable list, and the price depends on total length, on how many documents have to agree, and on whether a term list already exists. The number is fixed in writing before anything starts. The pricing page shows the four ways I work.

What happens next

The usual step is turning the style sheet into a standing style guide, so the next writer inherits the decisions instead of making new ones. If the exercise showed that nobody agrees what your own products are called, brand vocabulary settles that properly. And a proofread is still worth buying before anything is printed, because this pass was not looking for typos. The work is complete as delivered, and nothing further is assumed.