What is report proofreading?

Report proofreading ensures a report manuscript conforms to an editorial style, also known as a house or in-house style, which refers to the style preference of a publishing house or relevant government agency or department.

What does this service include?

This service includes proofreading your report manuscript to ensure that it conforms to the editorial or house style of the publisher or relevant agency. While not changing the meaning of a text, proofreading corrects any inconsistencies in the manuscript, improving the document’s look and feel.

What are the key aspects of editorial style?

Editorial style includes:

• spelling
• hyphenation
• capitalisation
• punctuation
• treatment of numbers and numerals
• treatment of quotations
• use of initialisms
• acronyms and other abbreviations
• use of italics and bold type
• format of footnotes, endnotes, bibliographies and other documentation
• Treatment of special elements. These can include headings, lists, tables, and images. Images fall into two main categories: figures (including photographs, illustrations, drawings, diagrams, logos, graphs, and maps) and tables.

Why is editorial style important?

At book publishing firms – as well as publishers of scholarly journals, newspapers, and magazines – a house style is used to ensure all authors, copyeditors and proofreaders use the same style manual (e.g. The Chicago Manual of Style or the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association, known as the APA Manual).

This is to ensure consistency in multi-author publications (e.g., magazines, scholarly journals, reports, collaborative books, edited collections) within a series and across similar publications from the same publishing house.

For reports in particular, house style may also be mandated to ensure consistency with corporate branding.

Is there anything else included in this service?

In addition to confirming the publisher’s preferred style manual, our report proofreading service investigates whether there is a preferred in-house dictionary.

We will also request an in-house style guide tipsheet, if available, or a checklist of editorial preferences.

Our report proofreading service will also include an investigation of earlier report editions or comparable text that should be consulted. If the document or manuscript is part of a report publication series, we will review other reports in the series for comparison.

Who is this service for?

This service is ideal for:

• academics preparing research reports for government agencies or departments
• consultants or peak industry bodies delivering evaluation or impact assessments
• nonprofits, NGOs, and think tanks publishing policy briefs
• University centres preparing annual reports
• research teams working on large, multi-author projects.

If you would like to know more about how Wise Directions Copyediting can benefit you, please contact us today.