Although today’s post is going to be short, the actual topic for today was extremely long. It is so long, in fact, that I’ve had to split it over two days. Yet that isn’t going to show in the notes as the topic is mostly practical exercises as I learn new marks for proofreading (which I will not go into here).
Unit 2, Topic 2: Proofreading Marks
Proofreading marks have been fine-tuned and simplified over the years. They didn’t start out as simple strikes and inserts.
It is important when you are marking up to have legible marks. Indecipherable marks only cause frustration, delays and further errors. Ways to avoid this is to use the separator mark (/) to define corrections and the circle for small punctuation characters.
When making corrections to typeset copy, they must be placed in the right-hand margin. However, if there are too many errors to correct and not enough space in the right-hand margin, then you would place some corrections in the left-hand margin also. The marks placed in the body of the text are called “text marks” and the marks placed in the margin(s) are “margin marks”.
If there are no corrections on an entire page, you need to place a slash (/) at the bottom of the page. This means there are no corrections and the author and/or typesetter know you haven’t missed the page when editing. This applies to stand alone passages on a single page too, i.e. newspaper or magazine articles. If one or all need no corrections you need to place a slash at the end of each article indicating this.
A standard convention in proofreading is to circle the instruction mark you place in the margin. Instruction marks let the typesetter know what you want done. For example, “bold” circled means to change the marked text to bold rather than insert the word “bold”. The exception to the rule is when you want the typesetter to insert a full stop (.), a comma (,), a semi-colon (;) or a colon (:). As these punctuation marks are small, the proofreader circles them to bring them to the typesetter attention.