Pre-Proofreading and the Proofreading Process
Pre-Proofreading and the Proofreading Process
The manuscript or document that a proofreader is working on should already have been edited and revised, perhaps several times. Although the process for proofreading is slightly different from that of editing, reading the client instructions thoroughly is essential to both.
Failing to follow instructions, such as "Don't proof the highlighted sections" or "Use APA style for the references," can be a huge time waster. Worse, if you don't heed the instructions, the client will be unhappy and complain. These instructions are where the client communicates their focus and vision for the document and your role in its revision; failure in this area, even if the proofreading is perfect in every other way, can easily lead to complaints and damage client relationships.
That is the question. There are differing opinions here.
Some proofreaders like to run a spell check first. There are a few benefits to doing this. First, it gets rid of egregious spelling errors. Second, in technical documents, it catches jargon and provides the opportunity to Google these terms and confirm their appropriate usage and spelling before beginning, which can save valuable time later, as you're not switching back and forth between the document and your browser so often. It also gives you an overview of the document, as you're likely to become somewhat familiar with the topic and content through checking these terms first.
Even though many proofreaders run an initial spell check, many other proofreaders choose not to run a preliminary spell check for a variety of reasons.
First, especially if a document is technical and full of jargon, there is a high probability of making erroneous changes if you start changing things without understanding the context. A lot of spelling issues are context dependent, and especially in academic and technical documents, there are nonstandard usages in various fields. For example, in psychology and some forms of literary criticism, affect is used as a noun (this is not standard in other fields), and changing this before you understand the content of the document will either create more work later on, or even worse, you'll send the document back to the client with the erroneous changes and have to fix them later because of a complaint.
Second, many proofreaders prefer to do their first pass with the tracked changes showing, but checking the spelling first introduces a lot of red insertions and deletions, which may make it difficult to see other errors. Overall, many proofreaders feel it's better to be safe than sorry. Just check the spelling as you go along, and then run a spell check between the first and second pass (if you like) and after the final pass.
That said, if you're familiar with the subject matter or the language is low-level English (such as a high school book report) and full of spelling errors, running a spell check first is a good idea, as there's a low risk of misunderstanding or changing meaning.
A final tip for spell checking involves the comments in Word. Sometimes, even though you've changed the language in the body—say, from Turkish to U.S. English—the language of the comments remains set to Turkish, which is a problem for spell checking. Luckily, there's an easy way to fix this. Just highlight the text in a comment, and click the Language button on the bottom ribbon or on the Review tab. Set the language to U.S. English. Now, right click the selected text, go to Styles, and then click Update Comment Text to Match Selection. There! All the comments are set to the variant of English you require, and you can proceed with the spell checking.
You can also use this process to format all the comments in other ways (such as font type and style). Just format the text in the comment the way you want it to look, right click the highlighted comment text and go to Styles, and then click Update Comment Text to Match Selection.
Proofreaders, like editors, have different processes they follow. However, the processes for proofreading demand attention to different things than the processes for editing. For our purposes here, we're going to look at the process of researching spelling and usage, proofreading a Word document, and proofreading a PDF.
Research is always helpful[/caption] Researching online to check spelling and usage is required for most proofreading jobs. The standard word usage, phrase construction, and so on in different variants of English (e.g., U.K. and U.S. English) sometimes seem to be flouted in certain kinds of writing. Among these are law, postmodern/poststructuralist criticism, and similar streams of sociological, historical, technological, biological, and medical writing. When first scanning a document, look for this issue—it can be interesting, but also time consuming.
Attention to nonstandard language found in certain "lingos"—jargon, in particular—can be critical to satisfying the customer. What seems like a grammar or word choice error might be conventional for a particular field. And in some cases, there might be different "registers" within that lingo. For example, a medical researcher might write, "Positive results for kidney were negative for heart and lung." As it turns out, this "telegraphic" style is just fine in a clinical memo, a title, or on a program flyer at a medical convention, but for most medical journals, "The positive results" is required, in regular text, to conform to standard English; yet "for heart and lung" is probably acceptable because in medicine, "heart" and "lung" are comfortably used as non-count nouns, however disturbing the effect might be on the editor. Whatever the register, be sure to maintain consistency throughout the document.
Google Scholar
Online research in such cases needs to be as fast and decisive as possible. There are specialty dictionaries online, and these can help. But the main resources are search engines (e.g., Google can give results with the word/phrase used in context, with the search words including a "narrower," such as the research topic or the target journal's name) and online sample journal articles from the field. It's advisable to stay away from Wikipedia (for primary research—you can always use Wikipedia to locate primary sources), textbook previews, and corporate sites.
Google Scholar is a great way to search through academic and scholarly papers. If you are researching some of the nonstandard language we were talking about earlier, and if that language is specific to a discipline or study, chances are better that you will find the correct spelling or usage of the word using Google Scholar than using a simple Google search.
The processes for proofreading are slightly different from those for editing, as most of the structural, stylistic, and language changes have already been made during the editing stage. Variations of the following processes are used by most veteran editors:
Perform all the pre-proofreading steps explained earlier.
Fix major formatting issues according to the requested style guide or, if no style guide is specified, to ensure internal consistency.
If the references require extensive work, fix them first or do so in between the first and second passes. Although it's assumed that the language of the body of the text was fixed during the editing stage, authors often add in references and citations later, and so the references may not have undergone a round of editing.
Your First Pass
You've finished setting up your document and defining problem areas. Now it's time to start your first pass.
Begin the first pass, which should be the heavier of the two, although not so heavy as an editing pass. If you're finding the document requires extensive revisions with regard to organizational issues, logic, clarity, style, grammar/language, flow, and content, it should probably be upgraded to an edit.
Check all the headings for format, spelling, capitalization, and parallelism.
Cross-check the in-text citations with the reference list.
Your Second Pass and the Big Finish
After finishing your first pass, you may want to take a short break if time allows. Then it's time for your second pass; now you can finish the document, take care of any remaining issues, and return it to the client.
Begin the second pass, which shouldn't take long. A third pass is rarely necessary in a true proofreading job.
Read through your comments, both for grammar errors and content. Be vigilant here! Errors in your writing undermine your credibility as a proofreader. The client may wonder, "If they didn't catch these obvious errors in their own writing, what didn't they catch in mine?" Don't leave the door open for complaints.
Review the client notes again to make sure you fulfilled all of their requests.
Perform a final spelling and grammar check. Check for extra spaces.
Include some notes summarizing the changes you've made and your overall impressions of the document, as well as addressing any specific client concerns. Return the files to the client. That's it!
Although it's uncommon to edit in PDF format—due to the inability to edit the text directly—this is a relatively common file type for proofreading jobs. The proofreading of some types of documents, such as business documents (newsletters, reports, and catalogs) and marketing materials (pamphlets, postcards, and posters), happens mostly in PDF. While the proofreading is the same, the process is slightly different than in Word. Whether editing or proofreading a PDF, your changes will not modify the document directly, so you’ll need to make sure the client can follow your directions. To begin, make sure you have the latest version of Adobe Acrobat Reader DC or PDF XChange Viewer on your system (both are free!) and open it up.
1. Upon first use of PDF XChange Viewer, set the preferences for the commenting tools. Go to "Preferences" and click "Commenting". Then click "Copy Selected Text into Highlight", "Cross- out", and "Underline Comment Popups". Now, when you need to make changes, you can just highlight the text and click on it; a popup opens with the text you need to change already copied into the box for you. This can save an unbelievable amount of time (especially in the rare case that you edit in PDF). It also reduces the chance of copying errors. If you need to rearrange word order in a sentence, just highlight, click, and change. (Many of following steps apply specifically to using Adobe Acrobat, but some elements pertain to XChange as well.)
2. If you’re using Acrobat, first anonymize your comments by right-clicking the ellipsis in the top right-hand corner of any comment, selecting “Properties”, clicking the “General” tab, inputting “.” as the author, and checking the “Make Properties Default” box. From now on, your comments will be anonymous.
3. Open the file and save it to your preferred location. Confirm the word count. If you use Word to confirm the word count, you can now run a spell check and note the corrections in the PDF file; this can be frustrating because the formatting doesn't usually paste properly and spell check identifies things that aren't actually incorrect, but it may be worth it to catch the actual spelling errors.
4. Modify the view of the page in the PDF file so you can read the document easily without straining and select text without issue. Once that’s done, click and drag across any word(s) you like and then right-click on the selected area. In Acrobat, choose “Highlight Text” from the menu that shows up.
5. The word(s) should now be highlighted, letting the client know that something needs to be done. There should also be a new box on the right of the screen headed “Highlighted Text”. There, you can type whatever directions you want to give to the client. To save time and be direct, type the correction in that box as you would have normally made it in Word. So if you were correcting “carrrot” to “carrot”, just type the correct word in the box.
6. To show when multiple words in a sentence have been corrected, place them in italics. If a word doesn’t change, leave it in plain text. So the sentence “I haz never axed for anyting my hull liff” would become “I have never asked for anything my whole life”. Should you want to give the reasoning behind your edit, tap your return key twice and add a sentence or two as explanation.
7. If a word or passage simply needs to be deleted, select it as you would normally and when you right-click, choose “Strikethrough Text”. You can leave a comment on why something was deleted as well.
8. The “Add Note to Replace Text” or “Add Note to Text” commands may be used as well, but highlighting is preferred for consistency. However, you may want to use “Add sticky note” to leave a comment on images, formatting, or the general quality of the text.
9. As with any order, conduct your first and second passes, review your corrections, check your comments for spelling and grammatical correctness, and then write the final client notes.
Last Updated: 10/01/2022