Your proofreader has ironed out the typos and corrected the capitals, and the proof is looking good to go – in theory. But what about the facts?
It might be tempting to cut fact-checking from the proofreading brief you give to your supplier – perhaps to save time or money. Maybe figures and assertions have been verified during the copy-edit or were written by a trusted subject matter expert in the first place. But checking through the facts line by line is crucial to achieve a high-quality, accurate proofread – and here we’ll share some reasons why.
The proof is in the ‘proof’
It’s worth reminding ourselves what we’re setting out to do when we send our work to a professional proofreader. We’re all word lovers here, so I’m not going to skip past the obvious: it’s in the name – perhaps in two different senses. The ‘proofs’ that are ‘read’ first came into being in the early 14th century with the onset of printing, and referred to the testing of a trial impression on the printing block – a sheet used to make corrections before the costly print run, a last chance to check and make changes.
According to its earliest use in English, however – a couple of hundred years before – a proof was ‘An effort, process, or operation designed to establish or discover a fact or truth; an act of testing; a test; a trial.’ And that’s just as important – your proofreader is fine-tuning and polishing, but they’re also putting the text to the test: establishing truths and helping you to build trust with your readers by ensuring content is correct and transparent.
‘Fake news’
Fact-checking in the proofreading sense isn’t to be confused with journalistic fact-checking. Writers don’t set out to misinform – quite the opposite. But inevitably the growing emphasis on credibility and transparency in communications is shaping the way content is received by its audience – and the increasing use of AI to generate content means a human touch in the final stages is even more necessary.
In our recent blog article we discussed the importance of trustworthiness in online content and outlined Google’s new SEO ranking system, which specifically boosts well-sourced, high-quality content and penalises websites with inaccurate information. So whether you’re sharing your work online or you’re a trusted organisation with a reputation to uphold, it’s vital to get the facts straight – before your work is committed to the printing block!
Which facts can I check?
Factual errors
If your proofreader is fact-checking as part of their brief, it’s important that they don’t make assumptions, and cross-check anything they don’t know to be true. They should always click on every web link to make sure it leads to the right place. They can also do a quick Google search on the following items and, where necessary, change directly (using track changes or PDF mark-ups) or raise as a query:
- Names (particularly if the text has several similar names of people or organisations that could lead to embarrassing errors)
- Dates
- Places
- Figures, percentages and statistics
Some errors are more obvious than others, so it’s important they’re cautious and, to an extent, sceptical. If a date is given and it’s in an entirely different century from the surrounding context, it’ll be clear that it needs checking – but it could equally be the month or even the day that is wrong.
Likewise, names may have been used consistently in the text, but show up as errors in an online search. There might be a good reason for this difference, so proofreaders shouldn’t be in a rush to make any global changes, especially so late in the process – but it’s always worth raising a query. On the other hand, if an annual report is being proofread, with many pages of facts and figures, often there will be no need for the proofreader to check these – so be careful to clarify this in the brief at the start!
Omissions
There is a second kind of fact-checking that is, in a sense, more subtle. Proofreaders should also keep an eye open for an absence of fact that hasn’t already been flagged in the copy-editing stage: an assertion or statement that’s delivered as fact, but with incomplete context.
A statement such as ‘Statistics showed that there were 450,000 more women living in Streatham’ has no typos and isn’t grammatically incorrect, but provides no context as to what the figure of 450,000 is being compared with – should ‘than men’ be added to the end? Or is this a comparison with a different time? Perhaps closing the sentence with ‘than a decade before’ would be more correct. This is for the proofreader to highlight and the author to decide.
Part of the proofreading process
Fact-checking is embedded in the proofreading process – to ignore it may be no less problematic than turning a blind eye to a paragraph obscured by an image, or a missing phrase. An omitted or misunderstood fact can have knock-on effects in the surrounding copy that can, at the very least, mar the impact of an argument, or confuse or irritate the reader. At worst, such errors can have ethical or legal implications, particularly for large organisations or publishers. Best to include it in the brief while it’s not too late, and while there is still that line of communication, and that safety net, between you and your proofreader.
