Refined proofreading for digital and print
Do you have a document you would like checked over before publishing it online or sending it off to the printer?
Perhaps you write marketing materials or shareholder communications for a company… or web content for clients (or yourself)… or prospectuses and booklets for a school or university… or a blog.
Maybe you are a non-fiction author or publisher with a book that requires proofreading… or a French native speaker writing in English, or vice-versa… or a voiceover artist with a script that needs tidying up before it can be recorded.
Whether your target audience is prospective customers, students, readers, people turning to you for expertise, or a colleague who needs a finalised document to work from, copy errors can be costly in terms of money, time and reputation. Spell check will catch some of them, but it has its limitations – for instance, it will not alert you to words that are spelled correctly but used in the wrong place (such as ‘you must now’ instead of ‘you must not’) – and machine translators often pick the wrong word when faced with a choice of several options in the target language. That is where I come in with my fine-tooth comb.
Don’t think of me as a critic, but rather as your Quality Control Department, someone who is here to provide a safety net and help you ‘put your best pen forward’. As a professional proofreader, I am trained to look for:
- typos, misspellings, grammatical errors and punctuation issues
- inconsistencies in content and layout
- departures from style guidelines (if you have any – if not, I can create some for you)
- problems with numbering sequences, tables, illustrations and references
- ambiguity and opportunities to improve clarity, flow and readability.
If you are unsure about the level of editorial work you require, this factsheet put together by the Chartered Institute of Editing and Proofreading (CIEP) should help you determine whether you need a proofreader or copyeditor.
