The Proofreading Checklist for a Finished Manuscript
A checklist for the last read of a finished manuscript, once the story, the sentences, and the copyedit are done and nothing else will change. It is in four passes, because a proofread that looks for everything at once finds less than one that looks for one kind of thing at a time. Every item is a question about your own pages. None of them touches style; at this stage the job is to check, not to edit. By this point the story should be settled and the copyedit done: if either is still moving, what order to edit your novel explains why proofreading last saves the most work, what kind of editing does your book need covers the passes that come first, and how to self-edit your novel before hiring an editor is the wider pass this checklist ends.
In short
Proofread last, and proofread in passes: a clean-copy pass for typos and doubled or missing words, a consistency pass against the book's own rules, a mechanics pass for punctuation and spacing, and a final read cold, in a different format, for whatever is left. Read the pages you changed last with the most care, because they carry the freshest slips. When you can no longer see your own errors, that is the point of an outside pass. Resist the urge to rewrite while you are here: a proofread is for slips, and changing prose this late is how a book quietly stops sounding like you, as we cover in editing your novel without losing your voice.
The clean-copy pass: typos and dropped words
Read for the words themselves, one chapter at a time.
The consistency pass: the book's own rules
Check the pages against the style sheet from the copyedit, or make a short one now: names, spellings, hyphens, numbers, and fixed facts.
The mechanics pass: punctuation and spacing
The final read: cold, and in a different shape
Once the three passes are done, read the book once more as a reader would.
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When the checklist is done
Then the book is finished, or as finished as your own eyes can make it. Whatever a careful proofread still leaves is what a fresh reader finds, and by this point your eyes are not fresh: they read what you meant, not what is there. That is what Edith's Stage 6, proofreading, is for: a pass over the whole manuscript, up to 150,000 words, with the same attention on the last page as the first, every correction arriving as a tracked change you accept or reject in Word. It comes at the end of the complete edit, after copyediting has made the book agree with itself.
Every edit with Edith starts at Stage 1, the Editorial Review: she reads the whole book and writes you an editorial letter on it, for $15, credited toward the complete edit if you continue. If you are proofreading a draft that has not yet had that read, what order to edit your novel explains why the letter comes first and the proofread last, and how to keep characters consistent across chapters covers the consistency pass in depth.
Frequently asked questions
When you have taken it as far as you can
Edith reads the whole manuscript and writes you an editorial letter on it: what is working, what is holding the story back, and what to fix first.
On a phone? Edith works on your computer. We’ll email you a link.
Email me the link to start
Edith reads your first 10,000 words and writes you an editorial letter, no credit card needed. The whole book, with every point open to discuss, is $15. Never used to train anything, and yours to delete.