Writing Tip #20: The Proofread

A writing tip a day every day for 2025

This week, I’m talking about the Six Stages of Self-Editing. I’ve alread covered:
- The Structural Edit
- The Character Edit
- The Worldbuilding Edit
- The Scene-Level Edit
- The Nuance Edit
- The Line-Level Edit

And today is the final stage of self-editing, the Proofread. In a proofread edit, you’ve locked the story (unless you stumble across a huge plot hole that somehow got missed in all the previous stages of editing and feedback), and you’re just looking at the nitty-gritty details. Including:

• Spelling and correct word choice (not “is this the prettiest word” but literally “is this word being used accurately)
• Grammar and proper punctuation
• Adherence to a house or personal style guide (I recommend Chicago Manual of Style in conjunction with Merriam-Webster dictionary, though it really doesn’t matter, as long as you’re consistent)
• Regional spelling or usage changes
• Proper formatting (including paragraph tabs, line spacing, orphans/widows, and hyphenation)

You might catch a couple line-edit type of details at this stage (did a character’s eyes change from blue-green to green-blue?), but usually this is not the appropriate time to be making consistency changes…