(Essay)

The general editing process consists of editing and proofreading. These are two specific and standout stages of the revision process and book preparation. But what is the difference between them both?

Editing is the first step. This is a process of preparing written, photographic, visual, audible, or cinematic material. It involves the correction, condensation, organization, and many other modifications, which an editor can do with the material. Editing corrects issues at the core of writing, like sentence construction and language clarity. A thorough editing will help to improve the readability, clarity, and tone of the text. Editing is an in-depth process. Here an editor works on the structure of the text, its headings, headlines, and its relevance to the text, the faithfulness of the actual material (the faithfulness of the dates, terms, names, etc.), spelling, grammar, and stylistic errors. This part provides the interaction of the author with the editor.

Another process is proofreading. It is the process of correcting surface errors in writing like punctuation, grammatical, spelling, and formatting mistakes, but it doesn’t include word count reduction, lexical or stylistics transformations. A proofreader’s work is finding misspellings, incorrect / missed punctuation, inconsistencies (textual and numerical), etc. Proofread is a work on the layout of the publication, when all text and visual material are completed.

So, editing and proofreading are the most important parts of preparing materials (written, photographic, visual, audible, or cinematic). At first, the author’s original must be edited, and only then proofread. It helps to improve writing, including language use, expression; to keep formal writing specific to our field. At last, the main difference between editing process and proofreading is that editing provides an opportunity to make an author’s writing better, while proofreading is a final check to guarantee language perfection before material publication.