Copy Editing and Proofreading

What’s the difference between proofreading and copy editing?

Both copy editing and proofreading happen once your game is written. The simple difference between the two is that copy editing happens before layout has been done, and proofreading happens after layout has been done. If you’re looking for someone to ‘proofread’ your game, but you’re not at layout stage yet, then you actually need copy editing!

Included with both copy editing and proofreading

• Correcting grammar, punctuation and spelling
• Ensuring that your meaning is clear
• Applying the house style (if any)
• Ensuring consistency in spelling, capitalisation, formatting, number style and hyphenation
• Checking text is internally consistent for sense
• Checking for incorrect word usage
• Deleting redundancies and repetition

As well as looking for typos, grammar and punctuation mistakes, it’s important that your document is consistent. For instance, ‘dwarfs’ and ‘dwarves’ are both acceptable spellings, but you should choose one and stick with it. Likewise, words like ‘recognise’ are perfectly fine with either -ize or -ise endings, but it’s not good to mix-and-match them within the same text. It’s the same thing when there are various acceptable ways to use punctuation.

In the mechanics section of your game, it’s especially important that your meaning is clear. Things that seem obvious to you might not be to your reader; if they find your rules unclear or confusing it can cause a lot of problems – in the worst case they give up and your game never even makes it to the table.

I will also check the more technical aspects of the text, looking for lists of seven skills that actually contain eight, stat blocks missing one of the stats and so on. 

What is copy or line editing?

This stage of editing takes place before your game goes to layout. It’s a word-by-word analysis of your text which provides an opportunity to tidy up your writing and identify any problems or mistakes.

Some people like to draw a distinction between line and copy editing, but in practice they are closely related, and I don’t distinguish between them.

Line / copy editing includes:

• Everything in the ‘copy editing and proofreading’ list above
• Improving sentence structure where needed
• Rearranging sentences and paragraphs to improve pace and clarity
• Fixing awkward phrasing to improve clarity and flow

Copy editing is NOT about changing your style. I’ll keep your tone and ‘voice’ intact, just making suggestions to polish the text and make sure that each sentence is easy to understand, flows well and does exactly what you intended – I’ll make sure readers don’t stumble over awkward sentences or misinterpret ambiguous phrases.

What is proofreading?

Proofreading is a final look over your game before it is finalised and/or goes off for printing. The proofreading stage looks at the design and layout, and includes:

• Everything in the ‘copy editing and proofreading’ list above
• Flagging awkward page or column breaks and end-of-line word divisions
• Cross-checking internal references (eg ‘see page 17’) and links
• Making sure formatting is correct and consistent
• Ensuring tables and illustrations are correctly captioned and referenced

Proofreading is not about rewriting your manuscript. It’s a detailed letter-by-letter check to make sure that it is consistent, makes sense and looks professional. It’s a light-touch edit and the aim is to make the smallest number of changes possible.

Before you get proofreading done, your manuscript should already have been looked at by multiple sets of eyes – ideally one of them a professional copyeditor. If you still have playtesting to do, material to write or layout to finalise, then you’re not ready for proofreading yet.

Why can’t you do all this yourself or crowdsource it?

Well, you can – but probably not all that well. For a start, it’s almost impossible to spot your own mistakes. You already know what your document is supposed to say, and your brain will fill in the gaps and gloss over the little mistakes.

Even if you widely distribute a beta or playtest version of your game and ask for feedback, a lot will get missed. A whole load of untrained eyes doesn’t equal a trained professional who knows what to look for and how to look for it!

Plus, crowdsourcing your proofreading makes a LOT of work for you, with comments coming in dribs and drabs from different people at different times and maybe even in different formats. There will be lots of repetition, some things missed completely and some feedback that doesn’t make sense, or is plain wrong. You have to try and keep track, make sense of it all and put it into some kind of order. It’s a lot of work.
If you go to a professional proofreader you’ll get everything back to you in one document, and you or your layout designer can make all the changes at once. At that point you can distribute the pdf of your game for further feedback if you like, knowing that you’ve already dealt with 99 per cent of the errors.