difference between proofreading and copyediting

Although these two words sound very similar, they are often wrongly used. Apparently, the fact is that Proofreading and Editing are two different levels of a revision system. Both these levels require close monitoring and careful examining of the report; they look into various areas of the writing, which involves various techniques.

Proofreading begins with inspecting the text to watch out for mistakes such as spell checks, grammatical errors, improper usage of punctuation marks, lack of uniformity such as fonts, alignment, spacing, usage of bold, italics, underscore etc.

According to the community of Editors and Proofreaders

“The proofreader checks the transcript for uniformity in the management and layout for efficiency, in the text and source for typesetting mistakes. Nevertheless, the proofreader primarily focuses only on the quality aspect of the document to ensure that copy-editor hasn’t missed anything. He or she isn’t liable for the uniformity and veracity”. Proofreading doesn’t comprise of re-writing or alters the style in which you have used to write the document, it’s done after the copy editing level.

Copy-editing involves in depth checking and needs numerous revisions to amend the progress and pattern of the document,& making changes or corrections where required, correcting and looking for legitimate lapses to improve or enhance the overall readability of the document.

Perspective of the Editors and Proofreaders