Proofreading

What proofreading is

Proofreading is the final read of a finished document, in the form it will actually be seen, to catch the errors that remain after editing: typos, doubled or missing words, wrong cross-references, inconsistent headings, and the mistakes introduced when text was moved into a design or a web page. It assumes the writing has already been edited. It is a check, not a rewrite.

It is often confused with copyediting, and the confusion is expensive in one direction. A copyedit fixes sentences; a proofread confirms that nothing broke on the way to the page. Ask for a proofread on a document that has never been edited and you get a clean typo-free version of prose that still needs work. If you are not sure which you need, the first call settles it.

When you need one

Any time a document is about to become hard to change. The brochure going to the printer. The annual report going to the board. The new website the day before launch. The proposal that leaves at five o'clock. The slide deck for the conference. A proofread costs a fraction of a reprint, and less than the credibility a wrong price on a printed page costs you.

It is the wrong service if the document has not been edited yet, or if the text will still change. In the first case, book a copyedit and proofread the final. In the second, wait; a proofread of a moving draft finds today's errors and misses tomorrow's. And if what worries you is not typos but whether a claim is defensible, a quotation is permitted or a competitor is named unwisely, that is a pre-publication review, which looks for different things.

What gets looked at

The whole document, on the final version, against a checklist that has grown over many years of finding the same things.

• Words. Typos, transposed letters, doubled words ("the the"), dropped words, the wrong homophone, the apostrophe in "its", and every word a spell-checker accepts because it is a real word in the wrong place.
• Numbers and names. Every figure that appears twice, checked against itself. Every person, product and company name checked against the first spelling. Every date checked against the calendar.
• Cross-references. "See page 12" points at page 12. The table of contents matches the headings. Figure 3 is the third figure. Footnote numbers run in order.
• Layout damage. A heading stranded at the bottom of a page, a paragraph that lost its last line, a caption under the wrong image, text that overflowed its box, a hyphen that became a dash, a straight quotation mark where the rest are curly.
• Web specifics. On a website: every link clicked, every page title and heading read, every button label checked, alt text present on every image, and the page read on a phone as well as a desktop.

What I do not do in a proofread is rewrite. If I find a sentence that needs more than a typo fixed, it goes on the query list rather than being changed, because at this stage a change can break a layout somewhere else.

What you get

The marked proof. For a PDF or a printed layout, an annotated copy with every correction marked in place, using standard marks or plain comments, whichever your designer prefers. For an editable document, a tracked-changes version. For a website, a spreadsheet with one row per correction: page address, the text as it is, the text as it should be.

The query list. Usually short. Anything that looks wrong but that I cannot fix without your decision: a figure that disagrees with another figure, a name that appears two ways with no way to tell which is right, a sentence that reads as though a word is missing but might not be.

A second proof if you want it. After the corrections are made, a check that they were made correctly and nothing new crept in. Recommended for anything going to print, because corrections introduce errors.

A worked example

An illustration. A regional credit union is about to print 5,000 copies of a 16-page member guide to its new fee schedule. It has been edited by the communications officer and laid out by an outside designer. The proofread takes a day and a half and finds 38 corrections. Thirty are ordinary: a doubled "to", two spacing errors, a heading in a different weight from the others, a caption under the wrong photograph.

Eight matter. The fee for a wire transfer is given as one amount in the table on page six and a different amount in the running text on page nine; the designer pasted from an earlier draft. "Effective January 1" appears on the cover and "effective February 1" inside. The phone number in the footer is missing a digit. Any one of those in 5,000 printed copies means a reprint, or a correction slip, or a conversation with a regulator. The credit union fixes them, I check the corrected proof, and it goes to the printer the following morning.

How it runs

1. A half-hour call. What the document is, what form it is in, when it has to leave, and whether it has been edited. No charge, and often not needed for a repeat client; an email will do.
2. A fixed price in writing. Based on length, format and deadline, agreed before I start.
3. You send the final. The version that will be printed or published, in that format. A PDF of the layout, the editable file, or the address of the staging site.
4. The read. Two passes: one for words, one for numbers, names and cross-references. One to three working days for most documents; same-day is possible when agreed in advance.
5. Delivery, and the second proof. The marked proof and the queries. After corrections, the second check if you have asked for one.

What it costs

Proofreading is quoted as a fixed price in CAD after the half-hour call. It depends on the length, on whether it is an editable file or a layout, on whether a website is involved (every link and every page state takes time), and on the deadline. It is the least expensive service on this site, by design. The pricing page explains how it is quoted.

What happens next

The document goes out, which is the point. If the proofread found a lot, that usually means the editing stage was skipped, and the next document should have a copyedit first. For a website, the same last look on every new page, every month, is content QA, run as part of content operations. And if the same names and numbers keep disagreeing across documents, a one-page style guide ends it.