There are several things you can do with your document before you ask someone else to proofread it. These could reduce the cost of proofreading, and also help you to be more in control of what you produce.
‘Find’
This is a simple tool on the far right of the ribbon at the top of a Microsoft Word document. It enables you to look for every instance of a combination of letters in an entire document. This means, for example, you can simply ask it to find every use of the letters ‘ise’, and then do the same for ‘ize’. That will immediately show you if you have been inconsistent with this common ending, for words like ‘organise’ or ‘vandalise’. You can then decide which spelling to stick with. You can even use the ‘Replace’ tool, just below ‘Find’, to make some of the changes. But make sure you only change what you want to change – there will be lots of words like ‘wise’ and ‘disease’ that must be left alone even if you opt for ‘-ize’ endings.
You can also use ‘Find’ to look for commonly misspelled or mixed words like ‘form’ and ‘from’, which are very easy to miss when reading your own work. Is there any instance of ‘its’ that needs an apostrophe, or of ‘then’ which should be ‘than’? Have you used a variant spelling of Hameed, or café, which needs to be kept consistent? The ‘Find’ tool is a really useful way to check this.
Headings
Proofreaders check your script more than once. Each time they go through it, they look for different things, and one of the checks, especially in non-fiction, is to see whether the headings have a consistent format and a logical sequence. Each heading will need a decision on font, font size, bold or Roman, placing on the page, and so on. It is easy to focus on the actual content of the document and to forget about making headings consistent. This is especially true when you start using sub-headings, and numbering for sections, such as 1.2, 1.3, 1.3.1. This is much easier to get right if you do a separate check just for headings, than if you look at them as you work on the main text.
Facts
My job as a proofreader includes grammar, spelling, consistency and so on, but it shouldn’t be my job to check basic facts. I usually ask for a clear ‘brief’ – what should I check and what should I ignore? Sometimes a client will say don’t bother checking the tables, or the references, or basic facts. But if I see something that I know, or suspect, is wrong, I will check it regardless.
I have seen references to an astronomer called Edward Hubble, to a national sports centre called Lilleshaw, to entering Russia in the 1980s, and to a financial crisis in 2009. Can you see the problem with all of these? Not all them are clear errors so I might politely ask what the intention was rather than simply changing the text. But in all these cases it was the job of the writer to get the facts right, rather than relying on the proofreader’s general knowledge.
I don’t – I can’t – check all the ‘facts’ in a document; but if I start seeing basic factual mistakes, then I will start doing a lot more spot checks than I would have done if I had a sense that the writer had done their own checking.
Accuracy Works 