Anybody who has a hunger to pursue a career in proofreading and editing should be aware of the following advice:
The trick to great writing or editing is to get the basics right, so in keeping with writers who have made their mark in literature; whether fiction or non-fiction;
Make your language as direct as possible; free of frills and tricks, intended to impress readers, supervisors, professors, eminent scientists or philosophers or captains of industry – trust me – they don’t have the time to sort out messy English!
(1) – Try to avoid using passive voice, unless it is absolutely necessary. Active voice usually works must better, is a pleasure to read, conveys meaning to readers clearly, and does not ‘bore the pants off them’ as they try to unravel what the writer is saying.
(2) – Watch-out for incorrect syntax; meaning that in our editing work, we spend a lot of time unravelling complicated sentences, where the phrases are in the wrong sequence and the sentence is three times as long as it needs to be, to convey clear meaning to the reader.
(4) – Incorrect word choices; Google is a wonderful resource for finding the precise meaning of every word, phrase or expression in English. Also, English is changing all the time as new words and idiomatic expressions come into the language every day. So, you as an aspiring proofreader or editor have no excuse for getting words wrong.
(5) Capitalisation of words or titles; It is essential to get this right and it is easily accessed through Google.
(6) – Gaps in the flow of meaning. Often, authors do not make sure that although the meaning of what they write is clear to them, it is not clear to the reader because the writer leaves out crucial words. So, the job of the editor is then to correct the syntax and put in the correct words.
(7) – Leaving out essential verbs, verbs, prepositions, pronouns etc. To me, this seems like lazy writing; but it is editor’s job to put these words into documents, to preserve meaning and clarity.
(8) – Academic Work. such as theses, dissertations and research papers should mostly be written in past tense, as usually, the bulk of the work has already been done, except for the introductory sections at the beginning of the document and sections at the end that are concerned with results and suggestions for future research.
(9) – Regarding tenses in academic research documents, particularly theses, it is vital for an editor to be aware of what tenses to use. To get this right, editors have to put research study data into past tense when the research was done pre-2024 and present tense when it was done in 2025.
(10) – Special genre; These include poetry, fantasy, children’s books that require special treatment and, with experience, editors will be able to recognise when some leeway with things like grammar, slang and the like needs to be given, and editors have to develop skills in order to tackle editing in these types of genre.
(11) – Editors should get rid of ” according to …” They should simply quote the research referred to by stating the researchers’ names, together with the date when the research took place and then state the researcher’s conclusions, or arguments.
(12) – Lack of complete sentences; There is a tendency today for moving away from complete sentences. Instead, businesses and business schools seem to prefer their employees and students to compile bullet-point lists, rather than actual sentences.
(13) – Past Continuous Tense – e.g. He was avoiding her (this is past continuous tense; signifying an action that is continuous rather than one that has already taken place, e.g. He avoided her. Using past continuous text when it’s not really necessary , complicates your writing and causes confusion for the reader; so whenever you can, rather use simple past tense.
(14) – Alluded – Certain words come into vogue that are over-used. Alluded means referred to. In most cases, it can be replacec with words that convey more accurate meaning such as ; said, stated referred to etc.
(15)
As an editor, it seems that although bulleted lists definitely have their place; encouraging this tendency sometimes produces a lack of clarity in the writing, when subject nouns and verbs are dropped in favour of bulleted lists. Hence I find myself putting nouns and verbs into the text, rather than endless bulleted lists, which tends to make the content extremely boring.
You can’t beat the tried and tested formula of NOUN (subject) followed by VERB, followed by NOUN (object) – that form the basic building blocks of the English language for clarity of meaning.
(13) – Paragraphs of fifteen lines or longer are very boring for the reader, so it is a good idea to break them up into shorter paragraphs of perhaps seven to ten lines or less so as not to send the reader to sleep.
(14) – The verb would – gives an element of contingency to a sentence. i.e. the teacher would write on the whiteboard … makes the reader want to know – if the teacher wrote on the whiteboard, what would happen? whereas the teacher wrote on the whiteboard is a straightforward statement of fact, without implying any contingency.
We will be adding to these general guidelines, as we come across them in our work.
Cheers from Hugo
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