Checklists for everyone! How I use them

In 2021 I kicked off my Flying Solo series of blog posts for the Chartered Institute of Editing and Proofreading with a piece on checklists. Oh, how I do love a checklist!

In that original article I talked about why they’re essential. In some contexts, they’re literally life-saving. Surgeon Atul Gawande explains the history of that in his fabulous book, The Checklist Manifesto. At the very least they save your blushes from missing a key step in your editorial process.

So, it’s now time to look at how I use checklists in my everyday practice as a copyeditor of scholarly humanities and social sciences books and journals.

Onboarding checklists

When I’m working on an article for either of the journals I’m the copyeditor for, critical there is consistency across all the articles. I therefore have a checklist for all the clean-up part of the job. Although the files have been through a pre-editing process by the typesetter, no one has looked at the language (and every file is delivered in US English, bizarrely, given that the journals both use UK -ise spellings!) and punctuation.

So I have a checklist that takes me through the essential steps to pull the article into house style – language, punctuation, elision, hyphens in fractions, how high to spell out numbers, whether to use ‘per cent’ or %, chasing down missing opening or closing parentheses and brackets… there’s plenty more but you get the idea. Within those first few minutes, even if I did nothing else at all, the file is much closer to the finished product. Working through that checklist gives me the biggest payback on my time.

For books from regular sources, I use the appropriate variant, or build a new one from the house style. In fact, I often use a twofer approach: I have skeleton style sheets ready for recurring clients and together with drawing on the brief can update those into a quasi-checklist.

Once-I’ve-started checklists

Mid-job can turn up a number of things that need checking. An edited collection can arrive with multiple Englishes used, from chapter to chapter, which need to be morphed into consistent language across the book.

For this, I have a chapter checklist, with a column for each chapter. The tasks form the rows. They can include:

• making the page and margin sizes consistent

• switching the language to UK or to US

• dealing with -ise/-ize spellings

• em or en dashes (or multiple hyphens that didn’t automatically convert to an em dash)

• the case to be used for chapter title, headings

• whether the chapter number has the word ‘chapter’ and is a number or spelled out

• checking obvious UK/US spelling pairs that are easy to find and clean up, like the Es in the middle of judg(e)ment, acknowledg(e)ment and similar, dig out analyz(s)e, arti(e)fact (which Word doesn’t catch) and so on

• closing up author initials in references, or putting the spaces in…

Dealing first with all that gubbins frees me up to concentrate on the less-automatic stuff in the edit, and ensures that I don’t overlook an easy macro-driven fix and end up doing more manually then is necessary.

A version of this type of checklist will make sure I’m on the ball if I’m anglicising text or pushing it over into consistently US English.

Another version, often made on the hoof as the job unfolds, will guide me through tasks specific to features of the book – often required when a book has to have consistent elements, like boxes, or a lot of end matter for each chapter, so that I get the order of, for example, discussion questions, further reading, notes and references list consistently correct.

I keep a log for each book, to keep control of the processes and timescale, especially if queries are going out to the author, and I have to be sure I’ve got them all back and actioned on time. It’s easy to add a task or two to that log, if all I need to do is make sure certain checks are performed for every chapter, without breaking out another full checklist.

Handover checklists

The biggest checklist of all is PerfectIt, of course, because I create a style sheet in that for each client or subset of a client (like the one I do two journals for, as well as books, with their subtly different styles but large overlaps of commonality).

Once I’ve done my own edit, and have all the author’s responses incorporated into the text, I run PerfectIt to chase out any last little problems – and I may add to the spellings/​italics/​capitalisation list or the style notes I’ll be returning with the job.

And then I have a fixed routine for the end of each job – it’s not long, but every step is essential. It’s tempting not to bother with a checklist for something that is indeed routine and obvious, but I still have one. I’ve seen too many editors bemoaning that they chased overdue payment only to discover they’d forgotten to invoice in the first place! Yeah, not actually life and death, but injurious to the health of a freelancer’s business!

Brain-dump checklists

My basic advice is therefore this: rather than try to carry everything you need to do in your head, or jotting down reminders on sticky notes and ringing your monitor with them, dump all that into a checklist. Save it as a template, and reuse all that brain power the next time, without the time and intellectual effort.

Keep your checklist under review, though – times change, requirements change, and you can find yourself having to remember to change, delete or add to the items in your checklist every time you do that particular work. That then means that you’re expending time and intellectual effort that you could keep for better uses, and adding a frisson of anxiety to each job, too.

Also keep an eye out for whether the checklist takes you through a logical workflow. You may find that some tasks can be performed more efficiently if they’re grouped.

At the end of each job, I spend a very few minutes casting my mind back and thinking whether anything could have been done better. Sometimes, I realise that a checklist needs a tweak. Very occasionally, I conclude that a new checklist for part of a job would be a very handy thing to have.

The main thing about checklists is that they’re used – that you do indeed tick off each item, rather than glancing down it and thinking yeah, I’ll remember to come to that. Well, probably you will. Maybe you won’t. And in the meantime, you’ll be having to carry that mental note in your head.

And all this explains what I said right at the start – I love a checklist! Now you know why.