What’s the Difference Between Proofreading and Formatting?

As a proofreader, you may encounter clients that request both proofreading and formatting services. These could be businesses that want their reports formatted in line with company standards, or graduate students who need their theses or dissertations formatted according to a particular academic style guide.

But as a proofreader, should you provide formatting services? The answer comes down to how familiar you are with formatting in Microsoft Word or other word processors and whether you want to expand the services you offer to clients.

In this post, we’ll discuss:

• What is proofreading?
• What is formatting?
• Should proofreaders offer formatting services?

Keep reading to learn more about the difference between proofreading and formatting and how you can develop your formatting skills.

What Is Proofreading?

In short, proofreading ensures the text of a document reads right. Proofreaders typically do the following:

• Correct any grammar, syntax, word choice, or punctuation issues.
• Check for consistency in spelling, capitalization, and typeface.
• Ensure the document follows the relevant style guide, including checking that any references appear correctly.

Proofreading often follows copy editing to ensure errors introduced by the author or editor are addressed before print. In the traditional publishing and content production industries (such as book publishers and marketing agencies), proofreading follows document design and includes checking for mechanical errors as well as ensuring the layout format of the text looks correct.

Often, a proofreader might only comment on formatting issues rather than address them directly, leaving designers and typesetters to correct the problems.

What Is Formatting?

While proofreading ensures the text reads right, formatting ensures the text looks right.

Anyone can have a well-written report or thesis, but if the layout results in boring walls of text without obvious structure and breakpoints, readers may feel overwhelmed and lose interest. In short, formatting ensures the document is professionally presented, be it a dissertation, journal article, blog post, business report, or even an entire book.

Formatting often includes the following tasks, depending on the type of document:

• Adjusting font, paragraph, and page-display settings.
• Applying styles for titles, headings, subheadings, captions, etc.
• Working with graphic elements.
• Inserting page and section breaks and creating page columns.
• Adding page numbers and section information to headers and footers.
• Creating a table of contents, list of tables, or list of figures.

Formatting a document can be performed in any standard word processor or design software, but most of the time, proofreaders use Microsoft Word. Fortunately, this program makes formatting easy by having pre-set styles that can be applied to headers, body text, captions, lists, etc. This makes it much easier to create a table of contents, a list of tables, or a table of figures.

However, simplicity often comes with its own complications! Once you’ve applied styles throughout a document, you’ll need to check through the whole document to ensure paragraph settings don’t cause awkward page breaks. A keen-eyed proofreader with formatting experience can spot these issues and troubleshoot them to ensure a properly formatted document.

Should Proofreaders Offer Formatting Services?

Whether a proofreader should offer formatting as a service is a matter of their level of comfort with formatting and the cost-to-benefit ratio of having this service. While offering formatting isn’t essential, many proofreaders do include it as an additional service. This allows them to provide a more comprehensive, specialized service, and in doing so, gives their business a competitive advantage and the potential to increase earnings.

A proofreader trained and experienced with formatting can set styles and apply them throughout a document in a matter of minutes. However, if the proofreader isn’t comfortable with formatting or doesn’t feel they’re fast enough to make it worth their time, then having this as a service may not be ideal.

Learning how to format in Microsoft Word is not difficult, and with practice, patience, and reasoning skills, any proofreader can become an expert in formatting documents. Plus, once they become proficient with formatting in Microsoft Word, learning how to format documents in other platforms, like Google Docs, becomes simpler. Expanding their formatting knowledge and capabilities opens up a proofreader to further client opportunities since clients’ preferences vary in terms of platforms.

Advanced Formatting in Microsoft Word

Learning how to format documents may seem like a complicated technical process, but it doesn’t have to be! Taking an online course on how to format documents can help you develop and master the skills needed to effectively and efficiently format a document, no matter the content type.

Knowadays’ formatting course, Formatting in Microsoft Word, will walk you through how to format documents in Microsoft Word and provide lots of opportunities to hone your skills. You can read more about the course here.