If I had a dollar, a euro, or 500 forints for every time someone asked me to proofread their text when what they needed was copy-editing, I’d have saved enough money to buy a last-minute train ticket from Budapest to Bratislava. In high season.
On the Editing | Copy-editing | Proofreading journey, proofreading is the last stop. It is about checking to ensure you have all your belongings, that everything is in the right place, and that you’re not missing anything before you get off that train.
Proofreaders check for stray punctuation marks; typos; odd word breaks at the end of lines (if you didn’t turn off the word-break function); mislabelled figures and tables; inconsistency in the application of headings or bullet styles; extra spaces between words and paragraphs; and widows and orphans, those words or short phrases at the end or beginning of paragraphs that are left to sit alone at the top or the bottom of a page.
No matter how good you are, it’s nigh on impossible to proofread your own work. Your mind will read what you think you have written, not what is actually on the page. I know. Believe me, I know. From experience. I could tell you at least one embarrassing story that would make you cringe.
While getting a native speaker to read through your work is better than doing it yourself, even if you are a native speaker, professional proofreaders have an eye for detail that comes with years of training. Just because I sit in a car park doesn’t make me a car. Just because English or French or Spanish is someone’s mother tongue, that doesn’t make them a proofreader.
You’ve invested your time in creating the content. Perhaps you’ve paid someone to write it for you. Hopefully, you’ve also had it edited and copy-edited. Not doing the last step, the proofreading, is a false economy. Pick up any menu that’s been translated into English and you’ll know what I mean.
I prefer to proofread print-ready PDFs. I will mark up the text with suggested changes. You decide what to change. What’s vital, though, is that the changes, once implemented, are checked again. This final step is too often overlooked.
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*Excerpted from LinkedIn recommendations.