Ask ten people what a proofreader does and you’ll get ten versions of the same answer: They check for typos, catch grammar mistakes, and give a document one final look before it goes out the door. That description isn’t wrong, exactly, but it’s incomplete enough to send a new editor’s career in the wrong direction…
Countless times throughout your editing career, a client will ask you to “proofread” something. Then they’ll send you a Microsoft Word document full of grammatical errors, inconsistent capitalization, and heading styles that change from chapter to chapter. They don’t want proofreading; they want copyediting. And if you don’t know the difference between copyediting and proofreading,…
If you’ve spent any time in editing or writing communities, you’ve noticed it: The same words mean different things depending on who’s using them. The four levels of editing—developmental, line, copyediting, and proofreading—have never been standardized in the United States, and the result is genuine confusion across the profession. One person’s “copyediting” is another’s “line…