Good proofreading practice means acknowledging that changing one word, or moving one line, can have unintended and damaging consequences throughout the rest of the book if we aren’t careful.
If we want to proofread for publishers, packagers and project-management agencies, or if we're checking self-publishers' print-on-demand books, we need to be comfortable with working on page proofs.
What are page proofs? The proofreader will usually be asked to work on page proofs. What are they?
'Page proofs are so-called because they are laid out as exactly as they will appear in the final printed book. If all has gone well, what the proofreader is looking at will be almost what the reader sees if they were to walk into a bookshop, pull this title off the shelf and browse through the pages.
The layout process has been taken care of by a professional typesetter who designs the text in a way that is pleasing to the eye and in accordance with a publisher’s brief.' (Not all proofreading is the same: Part I – Working with page proofs) In this case, the proofreader does not amend the text directly. They annotate the page proofs. You might be required to work on both hard-copy page and PDF page proofs – it will depend on the client’s preference. You'll be looking for any final spelling, punctuation, grammatical, and consistency errors that remain in the text. However, you'll also expected to check the appearance of the text. Checks will include the following:
This isn't a comprehensive list but it gives you an idea of how this type of proofreading goes beyond just checking the text for typos. If your client hasn’t supplied you with a proofreading checklist, you can access this free one when you sign up for The Editorial Letter.
What's important here is that every amendment you suggest might have an impact somewhere else. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t make the amendment; it means, rather, that you need to be mindful of the consequences of your actions – the knock-on effects.
What are knock-on effects? Professional proofreaders often refer to the indirect consequences of their mark-up as knock-on effects. A useful way of thinking about this is in terms of dominoes because it provides us with the perfect description of what’s at stake. Imagine you've lined up four dominos: A, B, C, and D. You push over A and it pushes over B. B then knocks over C, which in turn causes D to fall. Domino D’s topple was caused indirectly by Domino A, even though A didn’t touch D. This process can occur on page proofs and can have serious consequences. The changes we make can, if we’re not careful, impact on the text flow, the pagination, the contents list, and the index.
An example
Here’s an example to illustrate the point. Imagine the publisher’s brief tasks the proofreader with attending to orphans and widows (those stranded single lines at the bottom or top of a page). Solutions that involve instructing a typesetter to shuffle a line backward to a previous page, or forward to the next page, in order to avoid the widow/orphan might cause one, or all, of the following problems:
In all three cases, the proofreader has prevented one problem but caused others. Consequently, good practice involves more than blindly placing mark-up instruction on any given page. Thought needs to be given to how the problem can be tackled and the impact managed so that there is no knock-on effect. Spotting an orphaned or widowed line is not enough. We might also have to consider the following:
Summing up If you’re considering training as a proofreader and want to be fit for the purpose of marking up page proofs, check that your course includes a component about knock-on effects. Even when we are supplied with detailed briefs about an ideal layout, the publisher client expects us to be mindful of the consequences of our amendments. The proofreader’s job is to find solutions to problems in ways that don’t cause unintended damage.
Louise Harnby is a line editor, copyeditor and proofreader who specializes in working with crime, mystery, suspense and thriller writers.
She is an Advanced Professional Member of the Chartered Institute of Editing and Proofreading (CIEP), a member of ACES, a Partner Member of The Alliance of Independent Authors (ALLi), and co-hosts The Editing Podcast. Visit her business website at Louise Harnby | Fiction Editor & Proofreader, say hello on Twitter at @LouiseHarnby, connect via Facebook and LinkedIn, and check out her books and courses.
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Have proofreading symbols passed their use-by date? It’s a controversial question, but one that we definitely need to ponder. So, as an unconventional ‘celebration’ of 30 years in publishing, Melanie Thompson is setting out to answer this question – and she needs your help ...
Over to Melanie ...
A few months ago a colleague asked me whether (UK-based) clients want proofreaders to use British Standard proofreading symbols or whether they prefer mark-up using Acrobat tools on PDFs. ‘Good question,’ I replied. ‘I hope to be able to answer that later this year.’ That probably wasn’t the answer they were expecting. The widely different expectations of clients who ask for ‘proofreading’ has been niggling at the back of my mind for a couple of years. What's changed in three decades I have been a practising proofreader for 30 years, I’ve managed teams of editors and proofreaders, and I’ve been a tutor for newcomers to our industry. Yet I still learn something every time I proofread for a new client. It’s several years since I was last asked to use BS symbols for a ‘live’ project,* but I use them a lot on rough draft print-outs – because they’re so concise and … well, let’s face it, to some extent those symbols are like a secret language that only we ‘professionals’ know. I like to keep my hand in. But proofreading is now a global business activity, and ‘proofreading symbols’ differ around the world – which kind of defeats their original objective. And now so many of us work on Word files or PDFs (or slides, or banner ads, or websites or … ) and there are other ways of doing things. This all makes daily work for a freelance proofreader a bit more complicated (or interesting (if challenges float your boat). We might be working for a local business one day and an author in the opposite hemisphere the next. It’s rare, but not unheard of, to receive huge packets of page proofs through the mail and to have to rattle around in the desk drawer to find your long-lost favourite red pen. Usually, however, things tend to arrive by email or through an ftp site or a shared Dropbox folder. Digital workflows
The ‘digital workflow’ is something we’re now all part of, whether we realize it or not. But clients are at different stages in their adoption (or not) of the latest tools and techniques, and that leaves us proofreaders in an interesting position.
We need to be able to adapt our working practices to suit different clients; ideally, seamlessly. For that, we need to understand what the current processes are, and what clients are planning for the future. And that’s where I need your help. A new research project: proofreading2020 I’ve launched a research project, proofreading2020, to investigate proofreading now and where it might be heading.
The study begins with a survey, asking detailed questions about proofreading habits and preferences. Once the results are in, I’ll be conducting follow-up research for case studies and, early in 2019, publishing the results in book form.
You can find out more and complete the survey at proofreading2020. It's open now, and closes on 30 June 2018. Almost 200 proofreaders, project managers and publishers have already completed the survey. Several have contacted me to say it was really useful CPD, because it made them think about how they work and why they do things. So I hope you’ll be willing to set aside a tea-break to fill it in. It takes about 20 minutes to complete, but it’s easy to skip questions that aren’t relevant to you. There are only a handful of questions (at the beginning and end) that are compulsory (just the usual demographics and privacy permissions). Beyond that, the sections cover the following:
Your chance to join in!
Find out more and complete the survey at proofreading2020.
Don't forget, the closing date is 30 June 2018. * If a client does ask for BS symbols, I recommend downloading Louise’s free stamps for use on PDFs – they will save you a lot of time and help you deliver a neat and clear proof.
Melanie Thompson is an Advanced Professional Member of the Chartered Institute of Editing and Proofreading (CIEP) and a CIEP tutor.
Louise Harnby is a line editor, copyeditor and proofreader who specializes in working with crime, mystery, suspense and thriller writers.
She is an Advanced Professional Member of the Chartered Institute of Editing and Proofreading (CIEP), a member of ACES, a Partner Member of The Alliance of Independent Authors (ALLi), and co-hosts The Editing Podcast. Visit her business website at Louise Harnby | Fiction Editor & Proofreader, say hello on Twitter at @LouiseHarnby, connect via Facebook and LinkedIn, and check out her books and courses.
If you're tasked with proofreading designed page proofs, annotating for change is not always the best course of action. We're into the realm of when to mark up, when to query and when to leave things be.
A Facebook discussion about the role of the proofreader working on copy-edited proofs got me thinking about the issue of leaving well enough alone.
This was something that was addressed by my proofreading training course (via The Publishing Training Centre), and it’s a tricky nut to crack, one that on occasion still stumps me, even though I have years of practice under my belt. To clarify, this article is framed within the context of the proofreader who is working with page proofs, because this is the case where the artistry of sensitive and sensible proofreading practice really comes into play. What are page proofs? The mainstream publisher will usually require the proofreader to work on page proofs: “Page proofs are so called because they are laid out as exactly as they will appear in the final printed book. If all has gone well, what the proofreader is looking at will be almost what the reader sees if they were to walk into a bookshop, pull this title off the shelf and browse through the pages. The layout process has been taken care of by a professional typesetter who designs the text in a way that is pleasing to the eye and in accordance with a publisher’s brief” (Not all proofreading is the same: Part I – Working with page proofs). In this case, the proofreader does not amend the text directly. She annotates the page proofs. Why is proofreading an art? Proofreading entails finding solutions to any final problems that have escaped the author’s, copy-editor’s, and typesetter’s attention. These professionals are only human, and it’s unusual not to find at least a few problems in a set of page proofs, despite the fact that the manuscript has been reviewed multiple times. In fact, precisely because there are so many rounds of review, the opportunity for errors to be introduced is higher. The artistry comes in because it’s not enough to be able to spot those final pesky typos, misplaced apostrophes, incorrect running heads, missing captions, poorly aligned table figures, and so on. The good proofreader needs to know when to leave well enough alone. The Chartered Institute of Editing and Proofreading (CIEP) says: “… Part of the job is light editing within tight limits, but professional proofreaders do not re-edit the material. They intervene only with good reason [my emphasis]” (CIEP, n.d. FAQs: Proofreading). Here’s a brief summary of why proofreaders need to take care with the extent of their mark-up:
A cautionary tale and a lesson learned Have I ever over-marked? Have I intervened when I should have left well enough alone? Alas, yes. And I wasn't an inexperienced proofreader when it happened. I’ve elected to share my tale of shame in the hope that any over-enthusiastic proofreaders reading this will be able to learn from the mistake I made! A few years ago I proofread an academic book for a regular publisher client. The book was copy-edited by an editor with whom I’d worked on several occasions. She always does a super job. And, really, that should have been the only alarm bell I needed. The page proofs arrived and I noticed that the book was littered with whiches – rather than thats – being used for restrictive relative clauses. I changed them all. In pen. After all, I reasoned, even though in British English this usage is acceptable (though not always preferred), my publisher client is a stickler and the book’s market is international. Satisfied that I’d done a very fine job indeed I posted back the proofs to the copy-editor, who went on to collate my changes with the author’s. A week later I received a very polite email from a frustrated copy-editor. She informed me that though she, too, would have preferred to change every appropriate “which” to “that,” the author was particularly sensitive to having his copy amended and she’d had to settle for a lighter edit. She’d notified the in-house project manager and the decision had been agreed. “In future, if any extensive changes need to be made, would you be kind enough to check first? I'm going to have to stet a lot of your mark-up.” On an embarrassment scale of one to ten, I rated at least fifteen. My face was redder than my proofreading pen. I’d wasted my time and I’d wasted hers. And if I’d simply checked with her (or the in-house project manager) before I’d let my pen run wild, the problem could have been avoided. I still work for that publisher and I still proofread books for that copy-editor. But I learned my lesson. A note: A colleague who reviewed this article argued persuasively that the embarrassment shouldn't have been mine alone – in this situation I wasn't given a comprehensive style sheet detailing the decisions made. Either the copy-editor or the publisher could have supplied one – certainly many professional editors consider this to be not only good business practice but proper business practice. At the very least, someone could have emailed me with a brief heads-up. Nevertheless, since the proofreader cannot guarantee that they’ll receive such a style sheet, and busy editors and publishers are only human and sometimes forget things, my point about querying stands. It’s always, always better to clarify than to assume. Amend, query or move on? Editing is an art. But proofreading is, too. Sometimes we need to stop and think before we amend; sometimes we need to put down the pen and either query or move on. Knowing when to leave well enough alone can be a tricky call to make. We’re not here to re-edit. What we do sits in the context of a chain of decisions that have already been made by other professionals – decisions about budget, schedule, style, brief and design. Failing to acknowledge this fact can lead to time wastage at best, and harm at worst.
Louise Harnby is a line editor, copyeditor and proofreader who specializes in working with crime, mystery, suspense and thriller writers.
She is an Advanced Professional Member of the Chartered Institute of Editing and Proofreading (CIEP), a member of ACES, a Partner Member of The Alliance of Independent Authors (ALLi), and co-hosts The Editing Podcast. Visit her business website at Louise Harnby | Fiction Editor & Proofreader, say hello on Twitter at @LouiseHarnby, connect via Facebook and LinkedIn, and check out her books and courses.
If you’re thinking about becoming a professional proofreader, it’s important to understand that the term 'proofreading' can mean different things in different contexts and with different client groups. This article focuses on working with designed page proofs,
What type of proofreading you want to do and which groups of clients you want to be work-ready for will determine the choices you make with regard to training.
Some proofreaders work directly with the creators of the written materials being proofread – independent authors, students and business professionals, for example. These clients send Word files and the proofreader amends the files directly (often with Track Changes switched on so that the client can see what’s been changed).
Others work for intermediaries such as publishers and project management agencies. Here the author supplies the text files; then the in-house project manager (PM) organizes the various elements of the production process – including copy-editing, proofreading, typesetting and printing. After copy-editing and typesetting, the PM supplies page proofs to the proofreader, who makes annotations that identify where there are problems to be attended to. The proofreader does not amend the text directly. Here in Part I, I give the new entrant to the field an overview of what it’s like to be a proofreader working with page proofs. In Part II, I’ll consider proofreading work that involves working directly with the raw Word files.
What are page proofs?
Page proofs, traditionally defined, are so called because they are laid out exactly as they will appear in the final printed book. If all has gone well, what the proofreader is looking at will be almost what the reader sees if they were to walk into a bookshop, pull this title off the shelf and browse through the pages. The layout process has been taken care of by a professional typesetter or interior formatter who designs the text in a way that is pleasing to the eye and in accordance with a publisher’s brief. Page proofs from publishers and project management agencies are usually either in paper or PDF format. When working on paper, you'll likely still be supplied with a PDF (which comes in useful when using digital tools). In addition to the bulk of the typeset text, page proofs include the following elements: page numbers; running heads; a contents list; copyright information; cataloguing data; figures, tables and any other finished artwork; bibliography; and perhaps an index. The jacket may or may not be included, but there’ll usually be a title page and a half-title page. To reiterate, the pages have been professionally designed, so your job is not only to check for any final grammar, spelling or punctuation errors that have slipped in during the production chain; you're also tasked with ensuring that the appearance of the book is consistent and correct according to the instructions given to the typesetter by the client. Thus, you'll need to carry out a range of checks to ensure the following:
This isn't a comprehensive list but it gives you an idea of how this type of proofreading goes beyond just checking the text for typos. Download this free proofreading checklist if your client doesn't supply you with one.
Where are you in the chain?
The proofreader is one person in a fairly lengthy chain. Different clients work in different ways but the following is not uncommon:
The process is often further complicated by the ebook creation process. Text might be digitized at different stages of the process.
What does this mean for your working methods?
You're not actually changing anything … You can use digital tools to complement your eye – various scripted macros, consistency checkers like PerfectIt, and reference-checking software like ReferenceChecker. To use these tools you need to strip text from a PDF of the page proofs, place it in a Word document, and then run your digital tools. Any mistakes flagged up, however, need to be marked up on the page proofs – that is, on paper or PDF (as agreed with the PM). You don’t get to change the actual text – you only get to make marks on it (usually those little hieroglyphics that constitute, in the UK, the BS 5261C:2005 proof-correction symbols). But you're checking everything … Recall, too, that you're paid to check every word and every page. Relevant software is a brilliant addition to any proofreader’s tool kit, but it will only go so far because the proofreader’s job goes beyond error-checking. We’re looking for layout problems, too, because we’re working on designed text – the first draft of the final page proofs. There are legal issues … you can only use software tools that are already sitting on your PC. This is because of confidentiality issues. All of my PMs consider it unacceptable business practice for me to send the page proofs (or the text stripped from them) to a third party, as the following direct quotes demonstrate: Confidentiality is absolutely core … We send PDFs to proofreaders in good faith. The files must not be uploaded to external websites or distributed to third parties. We ask that anyone who receives a file from us in the course of their freelance work [...] does not share that file with anyone, does not post it to any remote server or LAN, makes no copies of it and deletes it after use. We send files to you on the strict understanding that they are for you to use only in completing the assignment we've placed with you.
What does this mean for training?
If you want to proofread for publishers, it’s likely that you’ll be working on page proofs. This means you’ll need to learn to use the industry-recognized mark-up language effectively and efficiently, and you’ll need to be able to carry out the necessary design and layout checks. If your training course doesn't teach you how to mark up using the relevant symbols or what to look out for in terms of layout problems, it’s probably not the right course to make you fit for publisher work. Furthermore, you’ll have to learn not to interfere beyond your brief. Not all publishers want every single inconsistency attended to. Amendments made at page-proof stage are expensive to implement so many publishers ask for 'minimal' correction. How they define 'minimal' will vary so you’ll need to work according to a clear brief. And if you’re not given a clear brief, you’ll need to ask for one. Assumptions about your remit are to be avoided – what one PM considers unworthy of change will be considered an essential error by another! The business of knowing when to leave well enough alone and when to interfere is one of the trickiest issues to deal with, so doing a course that has an assessment element is a good idea if you are working with page proofs and publisher clients. Summing up … Proofreading isn't some catch-all phrase that means the same thing to every client group. What you actually do, on which medium, how much you interfere, the extent to which you can use complementary tools, and the expectations of the client will differ greatly. This means a range of competencies will need to be acquired depending on whom you’re working for. Your training will need to match the requirements of various client groups – a publisher’s expectations in terms of industry-recognized standards will be different from a business executive’s or student’s, so take care to research any proofreading training syllabus carefully to make sure it’s providing you with the skill set relevant to your target client group. Your training should suit your needs, your business plan, your objectives; and what will be right for one person may not be right for another.
In Part II, I look at proofreading for clients who want you to work directly on the text in Word; how the line between editing and proofreading can become blurred; and how this might influence the type of training you do or the work you choose to take on.
Louise Harnby is a line editor, copyeditor and proofreader who specializes in working with crime, mystery, suspense and thriller writers.
She is an Advanced Professional Member of the Chartered Institute of Editing and Proofreading (CIEP), a member of ACES, a Partner Member of The Alliance of Independent Authors (ALLi), and co-hosts The Editing Podcast. Visit her business website at Louise Harnby | Fiction Editor & Proofreader, say hello on Twitter at @LouiseHarnby, connect via Facebook and LinkedIn, and check out her books and courses. If you don't have the full paid-for versions of, say, Adobe Acrobat or PDF-XChange, you can still use my proofreading stamps. At a recent local SfEP chapter workshop, my colleague Sara Peacock demonstrated the stamps. She says: "The stamps work with [the free] Adobe Reader, but the proofreader will need to ensure that whoever creates the PDF 'enables comments' before sending it, otherwise the comment tools that are needed (as well as the stamps, the pencil tool, the strikeout tool, and so on) won't be accessible. "However, all of these tools (or their equivalents) are available in the free PDF-XChange viewer, in which the stamps can also be used. (Personally, I find it a more stable piece of software than the Adobe version so I use it all the time anyway. It's a bonus that I don't need to insist on enabled PDFs.)" I normally work in the full version of Acrobat Standard, but following Sara's comments I decided to give XChange Viewer a try. I must say, it was a doddle and the functionality is exceptional given that this won't cost you anything. The stamps palette is much clearer, for one thing, and uploading the stamps is quicker, too. I'd recommend giving Viewer a try, even if you're a die-hard Acrobat user! Even better, XChange Viewer allows you to upload them all in one go! To access the stamps files, see the article Free Downloadable Proofreading Stamps. For a more detailed look at using stamps for onscreen work, go to PDF Editing: Making the Most of the Stamps Tool. For installation instructions, click here. Tips
Louise Harnby is a line editor, copyeditor and proofreader who specializes in working with crime, mystery, suspense and thriller writers. She is an Advanced Professional Member of the Chartered Institute of Editing and Proofreading (CIEP), a member of ACES, a Partner Member of The Alliance of Independent Authors (ALLi), and co-hosts The Editing Podcast. Visit her business website at Louise Harnby | Fiction Editor & Proofreader, say hello on Twitter at @LouiseHarnby, connect via Facebook and LinkedIn, and check out her books and courses.
This article contains installation instructions for most versions of Acrobat and PDF-XChange. Scroll down the page to find the set appropriate for the platform you're working with.
NOTE: Rest assured that you don't need advanced technical knowledge to install the stamps. In fact, you don't need any technical knowledge at all! You simply need to be able to follow the instructions as they are given.
Use the right instructions!
I've updated this post several times since it was first written in 2012 as new versions of software have been released.
Please follow my instructions to the letter. I've provided installation support to a number of users in recent years. On every occasion, problems occurred for one of the following reasons:
Again, please ensure that you follow the instructions step by step before you contact me to report that you're having problems. If you do need to contact me, please tell me the following:
NOTE: The first step is to DOWNLOAD THE STAMPS, whichever set of instructions your are using.
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