Tag: proofreading

Book writing: Copyediting and corrections

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I wrote earlier this month that I revised my book using the generous and helpful feedback of two critical friends. The files all went off to the series editor and he has finally started working through them. I have officially moved a step forward into proofreading, copyediting and finalising the files so that they can go to the publisher. Yay! and meh, all at the same time. I am having to dig pretty deep to really engage with all of the very detailed and minute edits that are needed because I am tired now and I really, really want this book to be finished, published and in my hands.

Proofreading, editing and correcting our work before final submission is part of all writing that we do, but it is not a part of the process often focused on as being important and worth doing carefully and precisely. It seems to be assumed that all writers will know that this is important and will know how to manage this part of the process on their own. As a lecturer and journal editor I have read many un-proofread or poorly proofread papers and assignments over the years. As a reader this is a frustrating process—I spend more time focused on the mistakes than I do thinking about the writer’s ideas. I have thus started talking to students in all my writing and research courses about the value of making and taking time to go over their writing carefully to catch and correct all sorts of errors that, overall, diminish the readers’ impression of both the writing and the writer.

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I am currently working through my book with feedback from the series editor. A few issues require some actual revision and bits of new writing, but most of it is editing and corrections: Harvard to APA; deleting commas where there shouldn’t be commas; hyphens to em dashes—that kind of thing. But, and this has been the super-tricky part for me, most of the corrections need to be made through reading the entire text again very carefully. I can’t just ‘Find and Replace’ my way through this stage. For things like change ‘s’ spellings to ‘z’ spellings and contractions to not-contractions I have used the magical ‘Find and Replace’ function and saved myself oodles of time and stress. But commas have to do with meaning, and meaning has to be carefully considered. So, I am reading all 78,000-odd words again.

This has been tough. I have a very short attention span these days, for one thing. I have also read this whole book about five times now in writing and revising and rewriting it. The more I read it over and over, the more I doubt my ideas and arguments and start to wonder if what I have written even makes any sense or is worth anything to my potential readers. I don’t read it and think: Wow, this is awesome! I read it and think: Is this even good? This stage is not mentally taxing because most of the corrections are minor. This stage is emotionally taxing because it requires me to be critical of my writing, to find the faults and errors and correct them. That is not easy for any writer to do, especially when they just want the writing to be over with.

But, and I cannot stress this enough, proofreading and editing your work before you make a formal submission, whether to a lecturer, a supervisor or an editor, is crucial. If you hand in a formal piece of writing with three different referencing styles, typos and spelling mistakes, odd paragraph breaks, unhelpful repetition of ideas, inconsistent formatting of headings and spaces, strange punctuation that interferes with coherence and meaning, etc. consider the impression on the reader. What might you think if you were a journal or book editor or a lecturer/supervisor and you had to wade through a piece of writing full of relatively easy-to-fix errors? I am not talking here about larger issues like argument and evidence, which peer reviewers and supervisors are there to help you think about and develop through revisions. I am talking about having the same font throughout a single piece of writing; having the same referencing format accurately applied; having correct spellings and no typos; having consistently formatted headings (which also connect to meaning and structure in a text), having pauses and stops where they make sense in sentences and paragraphs.

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In re-reading my book chapters to catch all of my own errors and update the formatting to the publisher’s/editor’s preferred format, I have been able to find a correct other issues not necessarily commented on, such as overly long sentences that need to be shortened or broken up; typos that I (and the spell-check) missed; and confusing sentences that do not make clear sense. It has been a frustrating, time-consuming, and hugely illuminating process. It is making me a better, sharper writer, for sure. I am learning that there is always more to learn about how to write for different audiences and different purposes. Writing really is a process without an end.

That can feel flattening—when will I be a ‘good’ writer? The thing is, making mistakes doesn’t mean you are not a ‘good’ writer; getting a lot of critical feedback doesn’t mean you are not a ‘good’ writer either. Although all of this editing and proofreading has been tough, I know that the series editor has offered all of it with the intention of making my book as sharp, focused and readable as I can make it. He wants it—and me—to succeed, so that feedback and critique comes from a place of care rather than negativity.

That can be a useful starting place for the painful process of proofing and editing your work: care. You care about your ideas, your writing, the time it takes you to craft papers and chapters. That care doesn’t only come through in the ideas themselves but also in the way in which you present and share those ideas. Rather than only considering the writer’s point of view (what you think about your writing), focus on your reader: what impression do you want the reader to have of your writing?

Being ‘readerly’ when we write means considering how a reader may experience our writing and thinking carefully about who our target readers are and what we want to communicate to them. Proofreading a text carefully is part of being readerly. It communicates care about your work and attention to detail. Writing is a craft, regardless of what you are writing about. As writers, we want the focus to be on our ideas, not on our typos, spelling mistakes and sloppy referencing. If we make and take time to offer ourselves as writers the opportunity to ‘polish’ the writing we have poured so much time and effort into, the ideas are what our readers can spend their time engaging with.

Photo by Suzy Hazelwood from Pexels

When I have felt like just giving up or shortcutting this process with ‘Find and Replace’, I have reminded myself of the series editor’s words: It takes time and effort to do something properly. But do it properly now or regret the errors at your leisure‘. After all of this time and work, there is no way I am going to out myself in the position of regretting this book or avoiding it for fear of finding mistakes I could have fixed had I just stayed this course a little longer. I owe myself and my readers my very best work. I think we all do.

Coming to the end (almost): polishing the Meisterwerk

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I have been seeing a lot of tweets throughout this month from scholars who, as they approach December submission dates, are coming to the end (almost) of their PhD journeys. This has led to me thinking back to this time last year and the final weeks before I submitted my thesis for examination.

There seems to a lot of advice for PhD scholars on just about everything you can think of to do with writing and researching a PhD dissertation – writing introductions, abstracts, methodology chapters, generating and analyzing data, surviving bad supervisor relationships and so on, but (and this may be because I did not really have much time to look too hard) I didn’t come across much advice on the nitty gritty of getting the thesis finished and submitted. In particular I was worried about proofreading, printing, binding, and the final bits and pieces of editing and polishing. Should I have a proofreader? What kind of things should I make sure that a proofreader has by way of qualifications? What kinds of things do I need to consider in printing out and binding the thesis for the examiners? How many copies? These sound like silly questions, but they made for a fair bit of panic in my little PhD camp in November last year.

I have recently been helping a friend find a proofreader for her PhD thesis, and she has had similar concerns and panic. There are a lot of people who offer proofreading and copyediting services, but there are about as many stories of students and academics who have had a terrible experience with a proofreader unfamiliar with, for example, academic referencing conventions or the more technical aspects of MSWord, and have sent back a thesis that is far from free of errors. Proofreading is often expensive, and to have your work come back without errors missed, or worse added in, is really frustrating. It also adds to your stress and your workload right at the end, because you have to re-read and check everything doubly carefully. In my professional experience as a journal editor and as a writing centre coordinator, I have gleaned this advice for students who are looking to have their thesis proofread and copyedited ahead of submission:

  1. Make sure that the proofreader has experience working with academic texts, especially theses or dissertations, which are quite different to your average 6000-word journal article or a more popular text, like a novel. Ask them what kinds of work they usually do, and what kinds of training they have, formal (editing courses) or on-the-job/informal (experience).
  2. Ask for references – who else’s work have they proofread? Good proofreaders who have the right kinds of experience and qualifications should be happy and able to provide these.
  3. Give them very clear instructions. Mostly, you want a proofreader to check that all your in-text/footnote/endnote references are consistent in style, and that you have a complete and consistent reference list; double check and correct formatting and spacing inconsistencies; and correct/mark typos and obvious grammatical errors. Give the proofreader clear information about the style you have employed so they can help you check for consistency (e.g., APA 6). You should ask for all changes to be marked up but not made for you, so that you can go through and accept or reject changes yourself; also if there are things they need to bring to your attention as the author, the editor should mark these with comment bubbles. If you are vague in your request for assistance, you may not get the help you are paying for.
  4. Good proofreaders will ask for your work to get a sense of how much work is involved, and should include a sample of a few pages of copyedited text with their quote and delivery date, so that you can see how much they will charge, how long they will take and the quality of the work they do. Charges usually apply per hour, or per page. Try to negotiate per hour rates if you can, as this may work out less expensive depending on what the person is charging you.

The biggest piece of advice here is to remember that this is your text and you have the right, especially as you are paying for it, to get the service that will help you polish the thesis in the least stressful and most accurate way possible. You need to be able to ensure that, if there are problems, you can stand up for yourself and not end up paying for shoddy proofreading. Researching this carefully will go a long way to ensuring a smoother polishing process. Ask other scholars who have finished who they worked with, or your supervisor; if you have a writing centre or similar on your campus they may have referrals, as might your library.

In terms of printing and binding, if this is required of you, your first point of call is obviously your departmental or faculty guidelines. In the absence of hard and fast rules, one-sided printing makes for easier reading, in my limited examiner’s experience (it also gives the examiner a space for scribbling notes for the report), and soft binding is obviously cheaper and lighter if the thesis has to be sent off to an examiner. It’s also easier to read and scribble on and mark a thesis that is soft-bound or ring-bound. The hard binding you can save for the final, revised and super-polished version.

These really do seem like little, silly details as I write this, but having (almost) end of the road advice (even if this is what you were planning to do anyway) can be useful as it is always good to know that you’re on the right track, or making tried-and-tested choices.

There is more than enough stress right at the end – dealing with some of the nitty-gritties and crossing these off your list can only help to move you closer to Submission Day, hopefully with greater confidence and calm. If you’re on the (almost) final stretch, keep breathing, make a list to keep track of everything, and good luck!