Editing and Proofreading - The Basic Differences

Many people consider editing and proofreading as the same thing and pay less heed to these stages of publishing. This sometimes paves way for some basic and silly errors to creep in the document and thus the document fails to deliver information in proper manner. Editing and proofreading stages are important stages as most of the typographic, presentation and consistency -related, and sometimes conceptual and factual errors, are filtered out in these stages.

Here’s a brief description about the editing and proofreading processes and some basic differences between them.

Editing  

Once the first draft of a piece of text is complete, it is submitted to editing for review. Editing deals with the structure, organization, and presentation of content. It involves rephrasing for smoothness and simplification of the content. 

Editing ensures:

• Clarity of expression
• Elimination of ambiguity from the text
• Consistency
• Proper flow of idea/concept
• Completeness of content
• Relevancy of the information
• Logical and meaningful flow of content
• Grammatical accuracy

Proofreading

Proofreading stage comes next to the editing stage. In this stage, grammatical accuracy, layout, and presentation of the content are taken care of and substantive rephrasing is not allowed.

Proofreading ensures that:

• There is no typing error in the text.
• The spellings in the text are correct.
• The content follows the same style throughout.
• The format and layout of the content is correct.
• Punctuation marks are used correctly.