Proofing 101: An Introduction to Proofreading

Proofing 101 reviews simple tips for streamlining your pattern writing and editing processes.

You’ve finally finished writing up that knitting pattern you want to publish and now you just need it edited.  You even have a great tech editor you trust to give you clear corrections, and a group of test knitters who will provide honest feedback if the instructions aren’t clear.  

And yet… you find yourself hesitating to attach that draft file and send it off.  You’re dreading getting back the file and seeing all the corrections that need making.  Or you’re dreading getting that email from your editor noting “hey, there’s only four sizes for the sleeves and you have eight sizes total, can you send the others?”

If you dread the editing process, maybe it’s time to get better at proofreading.

“Aren’t you a tech editor?” I hear you saying. “Don’t you want people to pay *you* to edit their work? Why would I need to get better at proofreading if I’m paying an editor?”

There’s a number of reasons why being a better proofreader yourself will improve your pattern editing process (or your blog post writing process, or the production of any written content, but I’m a knitting pattern tech editor so that’s what my examples will focus on), including:

It saves you time – and money. Tech editing takes time, and most tech editors either charge by the hour or charge a flat fee based on the assumption that editing will take a certain amount of time.  Any errors they don’t need to spend time checking or correcting is going to allow your editor to get the pattern back to you more quickly, and may even cost you a little less.

It builds your skill as a pattern writer. The sheer process of proofreading makes you look at your written content in a different way; when you proofread your work, you may start realizing “hey, I have a tendency to forget to add finishing instructions” or “oh, sometimes I write ‘repeat 5 times’ and it’s not clear if I mean 5 times total or 5 times more after the original stitches.”  As you recognize these common mistakes, you’ll start learning to check for them as you write.

It helps your editor give you a better final edit. I will do the best I can as an editor to make a complete edit, whether that’s catching typos, style inconsistencies, math errors, or just noting where there are unclear instructions.  But if you’ve already done a proofing pass to take out as many errors as possible, I can spend my time really digging into the details of the pattern to make sure a knitter will have the best experience possible working from your instructions.  It also means when I come back with my comments, you won’t have to spend as much time fixing the draft, so there’s less of a chance that a change I suggested gets missed.

Autocorrect and spellcheck can’t do it all. Auto correction grammar and spellcheck tools are getting better all the time, but one place where they really struggle are in industries where the common terminology isn’t based on common English words OR doesn’t follow standard grammatical rules.  Knitting patterns, with their many standard abbreviations (P2tog, SSK, etc.) and row instructions that don’t necessarily meet the standards for a full sentence, is one of these industries. That’s why it’s so difficult to spot when you’ve written “YO” in one place and “Yo” in another. It really takes a manual editing pass to spot some of these errors.

Hopefully, if I’ve now convinced you to proofread your own patterns, you are now wondering how to get started. My number one recommendation for proofreading is to work in a format that will allow you to immediately mark errors.  For some people, this means printing the text out and using a pen or highlighter.  For others, they will work on their computer or phone in a program that allows them either to make a comment or type in another color.  Marking is important because it creates a record of the edits you need/want to make – if you get interrupted halfway through an editing session, this will help you not miss any material and stay consistent (believe me, on long documents or complex patterns you may forget whether you chose to type out “cast on” or use the “CO” abbreviation).

You don’t really need to know standard proofreading marks to proof your work, and every editor has their own twist on the standard marks. When editing on paper, the ones I use most closely resemble the Chicago Manual of Style . These days, I do a lot of my editing straight on digital pdfs, and tend to use the comment feature, which highlights the text for which I have an edit and then has a pop out comment where I can elaborate, along with color coding to distinguish between text/style edits, math edits, and suggestions. The most important thing is that you know what your marks mean (and if you are editing for someone else, that you can tell that person what they mean). 

A snippet of what one of my tech edited patterns looks like, where pink symbols signal text/style edits, purple signals math edits, and yellow signals suggestions.

That is all you need to make your first pass at proofing.  In other posts in this series, we’ll talk about some of my favorite tips to make not just your proofing, but your pattern writing process smoother, more efficient, and less likely to result in some of those errors in the first place. 

Do you currently proofread your own patterns (or your own work)?  Do you think you might start?  What else would you like to know about proofreading or editing? Let me know in the comments.