You now know the difference, roughly, between editing and proofreading but, like all other forms of editing, proofreading and copyediting can also have some pretty blurry lines. There aren’t any really strict boundaries for proofreading but a good proofreader will not miss the words that are wrongly spelled or misused; a copyeditor may do.

What will depend on the specific company, service or publishing house that you use is whether the proofreader is allowed to make any changes or not. Some of the larger companies will employ an editorial proofreader; these have a good deal more leeway when it comes to copyediting changes than a standard proofreader does. And in other companies, there will be just one, maybe two editors who will do all of the editing from start to finish and all the proofreading.

Take a small newspaper company as an example. You might have a freelance writer who submits their articles to the editor and that editor may be the only set of eyes on that work before it is published. The editor may be one of a number of different departmental editors but where budgets are small or non-existent, there’s no such thing as a copyeditor or a proofreader. In that case, the editor can do one of three things – accept the article exactly as it is, do all the copyediting and then the proofreading themselves, or find an assistant editor to help them out.

Doing Your Own Proofreading

Sometimes it can be helpful to be your own proofreader even before you send it for editing but when you revise your work and remove extraneous words or rewrite a sentence or two, it isn’t proofreading; it is copyediting. When you move onto the proofreading stage, all the major errors and changes should have been fixed.

If, when you proofread, you do come across a major problem, you have two options. Highlight the error and continue proofreading; that way your focus stays on the proofreading. Or fix it and then go back to the start and begin proofreading all over again. It is especially important, when you make a big change at this late stage in the day, that you proofread the entire paragraph where changes were made. If you don’t you could find that the change you made could introduce other problems.

Things to Remember

The major types of editing are developmental and substantive; they focus on the big picture first.

Copyediting is a completely different entity, with a focus on sentence-level fine-tuning.

Proofreading is different again, another new step in the process. This is where the microscopic work is done and proofreading should the absolute last step, only after all the other editing work has been done.

Editing, copyediting, substantive editing, proofreading – it’s a real quagmire but when you learn to separate them all, you start to see how they all fit together. One of the best ways to understand how these processes work is to take a piece of work you wrote and go through the process from start to finish.