For my blog post, I thought I’d revisit my dark past on the other side of academic publishing when I worked as a copy editor and proofreader for two years between my undergrad and Masters. During this time, I worked primarily on review papers and news content. While I don’t claim to be a great writer or editor, I thought I’d share some easy tips to help refine your writing and make it more consistent. This is by no means an exhaustive list and probably most of them will already be familiar to you!
1. Consistency is key
I think two of the most important aspects of proofreading are ensuring consistency and using your common sense. For example, instead of agonizing over how you style a word, choose what you think is most appropriate and check that you’ve applied it consistently throughout the text. Check that style matches between the main text, headings, figure legends and footnotes. Some specific things to look for include the following:
- Capitalization
- If you’ve capitalized headings, has this been done throughout?
- Italicization
- E.g., have you italicized all your mentions of ‘in silico’?
- Superscript and subscript
- E.g., is ‘half-maximal inhibitory concentration (IC50)‘ the same throughout?
- Numbers
- Have you mixed up numerical and spelled-out numbers?
- E.g., I drank five cups of coffee and 4 cups of tea.