Why I think editing and proofreading should be done by different people: one big reason and two cautionary tales

I’ve written before about proofediting, the smooshing together of editing and proofreading into a single stage when preparing text for publication.

This time, I want to talk about using the same person for every separate stage – a one-stop shop to copyedit, proofread and maybe even do the layout for your book (or journal article – let’s say book for convenience, in this article, but what I say applies just as much to articles and, indeed, web copy, marketing material, company reports…).

The value of novelty

I’ve often said that, amongst all the whizzy tools in my toolkit for editorial excellence, the best one of all is my fresh pair of eyes.

There’s nothing like seeing a piece of writing for the first time. To the editor’s eye, or the proofreader’s, all the little things will jump out that everyone else has overlooked. After they’ve been with the text for a while, though, and are no longer reading it for the first time, they can also start to see what they expect to see, because that’s just how the human brain works – it anticipates.

The author spends the most time with their book. They plan it, write it, adjust it, review it, (ideally leave it aside for a while to try to come back to it fresher), throw out chunks, write new ones, find new info and shoehorn it in, find better ways of saying things (using more apt words, perhaps? Sorry, couldn’t resist), and rework it time and time again. And that is how one author I worked with had written that there are eight illegal guns in one particular region of Africa, not noticing she’d omitted the word ‘million’ from that sentence.

So what you don’t want is for your editor and proofreader to fall into the same trap.

A defence of sorts…

I know several editors who do indeed offer a one-stop shop for editorial services. And I get that, for a client who isn’t accustomed to finding reliable editorial assistance, it can be a comfort to find someone you can trust and then lean on them to do everything.

The editors I know who do offer the complete service rely in large part on there being decent-sized gaps between each stage and, of course, they have their professional editorial and proofreading tools and techniques, and all their experience, to help them deliver.

But it makes me uneasy. I’d not want to do it. In fact I don’t do it. Here’s why.

A cautionary tale

I had one such experience. I was hired to copyedit a memoir. So far, so good. We went through a few rounds of editing, then the author decided I was also to design the book cover. Never done that in my life before!

I explained this, but she was adamant, so (designers, forgive me!) I produced a book cover and it only needed a little tweaking for the client to love it. And it wasn’t anything to do with the text itself, so that was OK and who doesn’t love a vertical learning curve?

Next, she wanted me to design the interior and produce a print-ready PDF. Eek! Never done that before, either. I explained that, too, but again she persuaded me (I’m such a pushover…). And, frankly, I was very happy with what I produced – it wasn’t about the content of the book, but the aesthetics and mechanics, so that was OK. The client was also happy, and I benefited from another vertical learning curve.

And then we locked swords.

She wanted me to proofread the PDF. I dug my heels in and refused. Nope. Nopety-nope-nope. She insisted. Stalemate.

I knew the text as well as she knew it by now, after those several rounds of editing, and I was adamant there was no way I was competent to proofread my own editing. I knew that there would still be some bloopers in there (because I’m a human being and it’s therefore pretty inevitable).

So – on condition that I find the proofreader – she was, eventually, persuaded that a fresh pair of eyes would be in order. It wouldn’t cost any extra – she’d just be paying a different person.

The relief! We hired a proofreader I knew would do a great job and he found what he said was flatteringly little, but it was stuff I couldn’t believe I’d missed. And I’d have carried on missing it, in all probability, and those bloopers would have made it into print.

Many hands make light work

So, when you are getting your book ready, take steps to have as many people as possible read it before you send it off to the publisher.

Each person cleans up the text, but no one of them will find everything – that’s a function of being a normal fallible human being (and don’t make the mistake of thinking AI-based checkers will do any better – all the ones I’ve experimented with are far too keen on inserting nonsense and downright errors!). But as each new person comes to text that’s getting progressively cleaner, the remaining problems become easier to spot and fix, and this is necessarily an iterative process.

Smart editors, when they find a published typo or other goof, don’t crow ‘Gotcha!’ and think what a lousy job someone did. They think “What else was going on in the text to make them miss that?” It’s the nature of editing that, afterwards, people don’t see the 99.99% of errors that were fixed – because those no longer exist – but they may see some of the 0.01% that slid through the net.

And you’re only going to reach that high rate of fix with multiple people coming at the text afresh, in sequence.

Your beta readers, who, in the academy, will have a pretty keen eye, will give you the first feedback and will inevitably find things you can fix, or need to consider further.

Use beta readers! Your book will – we all hope – sell well and have many readers. Get used to handing your literary baby over to other folks as early as possible. If you’re writing for publication, at some stage people are going to have to be able to read it!

Beta readers will tend to concentrate on the content – whether they’re reading your new research in their field, or galloping through your page-turner of a novel. But they’ll spot things and, hopefully, think to point them out to you, as well as make broader comments on the book’s argument or story. Some of the things they find will be in common with each other, just one or two people may pick up on other things.

Beta readers are neither copyeditors nor proofreaders (for the most part – there are bound to be some exceptions).

So if you’re funding your own copyediting and proofreading, take advantage of hiring two fresh pairs of eyes, not just one. I’ve also written about how to find and hire your editorial professionals, and about the different stages in the process to help make this as painless as possible.

Your go-to for finding excellent editors and proofreaders should be the Chartered Institute of Editing and Proofreading Directory of Editorial Services – just pop some key words in the search box and sit back to be presented with a list of people you can sift through. Include subject words as well as service words.

One final story

Here’s one that happened to me yesterday, as I write the first draft this article. I rarely work on fiction, but I’ve a long-standing relationship with an author I’ve been editing for more than a decade. His books are my annual holiday from footnotes, bibliographies and tables.

I’d made a character list and tracked the timeline, and I was doing my final checks of the mechanics of the book before sending the files back. As I went through checking that the italics were well behaved, I spotted Howard’s girlfriend Olive (names changed to protect the innocent) was called Olivia at the first mention. I checked and yes – one Olivia, umpteen Olives.

I say again, I had made a character list. I found this blooper whilst I was checking something else – I got lucky.

If I got the book back to proofread, knowing that I’d done character lists and all was tickety-boo so far as I was concerned, how likely is it that I’d spot the Olive/​Olivia problem then? It’s a long book – a very long book. It’s possible I’d get lucky, I suppose. I got lucky that first time. Do you want to rely on luck?

Or do you want to rely on a fresh pair of eyes, coming to the text anew, with no familiarity, no assumptions, and trained to look for what everyone else missed?