To Change or Not to Change? When to Edit a Document

That, as one famously poor speller might put it, is the question.

One challenging part of being a proofreader is knowing when to make changes and when to leave well alone. It’s a delicate balance, and it requires more than a set of rules. More than anything, it requires common sense and good judgement.

However, it would be remiss of us not to offer some advice on the subject.

1. Spelling, Grammar and Punctuation

Issues of spelling, grammar and punctuation are the proofreader’s bread and butter. Unless you have been instructed otherwise, any straightforward errors that fall into these categories may be safely changed. This includes errors that might not be underlined by Microsoft Word’s spelling and grammar checker. Look at the following sentence, for example:

You can confidently change all the highlighted errors here, even though the misspellings of ‘know’ and ‘to’ may not be picked up by the spellchecker.

The main exception in this case would be creative writing: an author may have used non-standard spellings deliberately (e.g. in fictional dialogue to capture a specific voice). However, you may comment on ‘errors’ in creative writing if you’re not sure they’re deliberate.

2. Clumsy Wording

Clumsy wording is a much greyer area. But if a sentence is so poorly worded that it’s grammatically incorrect, it should generally be changed. Let’s take a look at an example:

Not easy always to know what to change it is.

Once you’ve got over your excitement at proofreading a document written by Yoda, you can rearrange the words so that they are grammatically correct:

It is not always easy to know what to change.

However, sometimes the wording is just a bit clunky. Take the sentence below:

Some of the time, it can be a little bit difficult to know when to make changes, and it is also hard to know when not to make changes so but to leave a sentence alone.

This is not a particularly pleasant sentence to read. It’s repetitive and overly long. But is it incorrect? And should you edit it? The answer will depend on the situation.

First, you need to consider your brief. Did the client ask you to perform the level of editing required for the document? If so, you may want to make it clearer or more concise. But if you’ve been asked for a ‘proofread’ in the strict traditional sense – i.e. correcting explicit errors only, not making other changes – you might want to leave it alone.

Furthermore, in academic writing or any document where plagiarism is an issue, you will not want to make any edits that change the fundamental meaning of a sentence.

3. Factual Inaccuracies

Factual inaccuracies fall into a similar category to clumsy wording. Whether or not you should change them will depend on the context and the brief you were provided.

Most important here is that fact-checking is not a normal part of the proofreading process. And unless you’ve been asked to do it as part of your brief as an editor, you will not be expected to double check every piece of factual information in a document. This is typically a job for a specialist. There are even people who work as full-time professional fact-checkers!

However, if you spot an obvious factual error in a document, you may still want to make a change or leave a comment noting the problem. Take the following, for example:

Captain America was played in the MCU by Chris Evans, who was previously known for presenting the Big Breakfast and TFI Friday on UK television.

If you know a little about film or TV personalities, it may be obvious that the author has confused two people called Chris Evans here. And as an editor, you would probably want to leave a comment noting this confusion, perhaps with a link to their separate IMDB pages. Or you may even want to edit it directly by changing the “previously known for” examples.

The key is that, even if you’re not fact-checking in the strict sense, clients will appreciate it if you help them avoid factual errors. And that will help you secure repeat work.

Having said that, you must be careful with academic writing. Any factual edit you make that isn’t clearly a typo, even correcting the ‘Chris Evans’ confusion above, could qualify as plagiarism. And this is always outside of an editing/proofreading remit. Thus, here we have to turn to another iconic and quotable character and advise you to ‘Let It Go’.