Proofreading: the process that actually holds

Proofreading is the step every year group plans for and almost none sees through. The reason is always the same: it comes at the end, it is unpopular, and by then everybody is done with the project.

The price is high because it is permanent. A misspelled surname sits in 120 copies that stand on shelves for 30 years.

Two rounds, not one

One round finds the obvious mistakes. It doesn’t find the ones created by correcting them — and that is a surprisingly large group.

Round 1 — content (2–3 days) Is everything that’s claimed correct? Names spelled right, courses correctly attributed, quotes with the right person, captions on the right picture. Commas aren’t looked at yet.

Round 2 — form (2 days) Spelling, punctuation, hyphenation, line breaks, page numbers, word breaks at line ends. Only now, because line breaks shift with every content change.

And in between, something that isn’t proofreading but matters just as much: one person looks at the complete PDF once from front to back without reading. Just looking at pages. That finds empty pages, duplicated pages, a photo at the wrong size, a missing chapter break — things nobody notices while reading, because you read text, not layout.

Fixed roles, or it doesn’t happen

“Everybody have a look” is the reliable route to nobody reading. Two named people beat ten unnamed ones.

Role	Who	Task
Proofreader 1	Somebody who writes well	All of round 1
Proofreader 2	A different person	All of round 2
Layout	From the layout team	Applies the changes
Sign-off	The person in charge	Says “this goes out”

Important: proofreaders 1 and 2 are two different humans. Read a text twice and the second time you read what you expect.

And more important still: whoever built the layout doesn’t proofread it. You don’t see your own mistakes. That isn’t a question of care.

The log

Corrections in a chat get lost. Twelve messages saying “p. 43 name wrong” are untraceable after two days, and nobody knows what has been done.

Use a simple list — a table, a shared document, anything, as long as it has these four columns:

Page | What's wrong             | Correct version  | done
-----+--------------------------+------------------+------
  12 | "Müller" instead "Möller"| Möller           |  x
  43 | quote on wrong teacher   | → Ms Weber       |
  67 | image blurry             | new one from L.K.|  x

Two rules for it:

• Only one list. Two lists are worse than none.
• Whoever corrects ticks it off — not whoever reported it. Otherwise everything says “done” at the end and half of it isn’t.

What gets found most often

If you’re short on time, check these points first. They make up most of the real mistakes:

1. Names. Especially double-barrelled names, umlauts, ß, hyphenated names. Check against an official list, not against memory.
2. Attributions. A quote on the wrong teacher, a photo on the wrong person, a course report under the wrong course. The most embarrassing type of error.
3. Numbers. The year group, years, the leaving year in the title. Yes, that has been printed wrong before.
4. Missing people. Anyone who didn’t hand in a profile is missing entirely — which you don’t notice while reading, because there is no gap. Count against the name list.
5. Placeholders. “Lorem ipsum”, “TODO”, “name here”, “xxx”. Search for them explicitly.
6. Breaks and hyphenation. A word split across two pages, or a heading alone at the bottom of a page.
7. Duplicates. The same photo twice, the same quote on two pages.

The timing

Proofreading needs a finished pagination. Correcting earlier is double work, because every line still moves. So it sits exactly in the two weeks between the internal deadline and the print handover — see The last two weeks before the deadline.

Concretely:

• Day 1: export the complete PDF, send it to both proofreaders.
• Day 2–4: round 1.
• Day 5: apply the changes, export again.
• Day 6–7: round 2 in the new PDF.
• Day 8: apply the changes, export again.
• Day 9: leaf through without reading, sign off.
• Day 10: hand over. Two days of buffer remain.

The point where this goes wrong: proofreading in the old PDF while layout is already working in the new one. So export again after every round and expressly declare the old version invalid.

Practically, in AbiHive

Two things help without you having to do anything for them:

• You can export a complete PDF at any time — mid-project too. Proofing rounds therefore need no special effort, just a click. Who exported when is in the export list, which makes telling the versions apart easier.
• The content comes from one source. A name corrected in the profile is corrected everywhere afterwards — there is no second place where it is still wrong. That removes exactly the class of error that correcting creates.

What AbiHive does not do: tell you that a quote is attributed to the wrong person. No program can know that. Two humans and a list are not replaceable here.

Takeaways

• Two rounds, two different people, content before form.
• Whoever built the layout doesn’t proofread.
• One list with four columns, ticked off by the person who corrects.
• Names and attributions first, against an official list.
• Leaf through the whole thing once without reading.
• Export again after every round, declare the old version invalid.

Next: Handing over print files properly.