Tuesday 7 July 2009

Prof's my name and proofreading's my game

I can proofread any document written in the Queen's English. If you are a student with a dissertation, a writer with a novel or a freelancer with a document draft please drop me an 'e' and I'll give you an 'A'.

To help me deliver the best possible service a style guide would be useful. For example, if you use the suffix -ize do you consistently use American spellings, like color, or are they sporadic and inconsistent?

If possible can you please include a design specification for titles, chapter headings, running headlines, references, bibliographies, bullet points and any tables/illustrations used.

To further improve my proofreading service I would like to see ten pages of standard text. Then I can assess the level of corrections required and give a more accurate completion date.

Finally, if you want me to proofread a hard copy I will be using the 2005 British Standard Institution symbols. If you are not familiar with these I can, of course, use a more simplistic form of marking. Please indicate. The more information I have from you the better the quality of my proofreading service.

So what is proofreading? Well it's not copy-editing; proofreaders do not rewrite text. As long as the sentence is grammatically correct and makes sense we leave it be, even if it is awkwardly phrased.

What I do is check documents for correct spelling, punctuation and grammar, as well as for consistency errors. For example, if you spell a word in a specific way on page one I make sure it is spelt the same on later pages.


'Soap and education are not as sudden as a massacre, but they are more deadly in the long run.' Mark Twain