Start Making Sense: What to Do When a Document Is Hard to Follow

Early January is just like any other time of year, except you see a lot more people jogging in an attempt to keep to their new year’s resolutions. But here at Proofreading Academy, we believe that your resolutions don’t have to be exhausting! So instead of paying a year’s membership fees for two days at the gym this year, why not resolve to improve your working practice?

And because our new year’s resolution is to be kind to our fellow proofreaders, we’re offering this brief guide to what to do when you cannot follow your client’s writing. So what should you do when editing a document that doesn’t make sense? Here are a few helpful tips.

1. Do Some Detective Work

If a single word or phrase seems unusual in a document, prepare to do a bit of investigating. You can usually make sense of it from the context. Take this for instance:

When is the new year starting, many person do revolutions to improve the self.

This is fairly basic, and the gist of the sentence is clear enough from references to the new year and self-improvement. As such, we can assume that revolutions was meant to read resolutions. It is also quickly evident that, although the sentence begins like a question, it is meant to be a statement. So you could change it to something like:

When the new year begins, many people make resolutions to improve themselves.

It’s not always this simple, but the strategy of gauging what a sentence might mean from the surrounding text should be your first port of call when things get confusing.

2. Play It Safe

Sometimes, all your detective work will be in vain and the meaning won’t be clear enough to confidently make changes. When this happens, there’s one thing we really need to stress…

DO. NOT. JUST. GUESS. AND. LEAVE. IT. AT. THAT.

If you are truly unsure what a client is saying, guessing could lead to errors or changing the meaning of a sentence. And you cannot be sure that your client will check every edit carefully. Thus, any edit you make in these cases should be flagged, link in the following:

Alternatively, you may simple want to comment with a suggested edit or to raise the issue so that the client can clarify it themselves. For instance:

Either way, it is better to be cautious if you’re not certain you understand something.

3. The Last Resort

Sometimes a document is so unintelligible the only way to make it right would be to completely rewrite it. But this is not usually the job of a proofreader. And, in the case of academic documents that will be assessed, it would qualify as plagiarism.

In these rare cases, you may have to decline the job. If you are working for a proofreading company, they should  have processes in place for situations like this. If you work for yourself, you will have to make that call. But now you know! Keep this advice in mind, and you can be sure of keeping to your new year’s resolutions throughout the year.