Proofreading

Always, always, proofread and check your work

before submission to the client

Clients have tight deadlines, so to assist clients we need to know how long specific tasks take to complete and the client needs to know what is involved.

If you have plain copy typing, (an example would be a book with just text), if you work full time you could probably do between 15 and 20 pages per day, single spacing, that is just the typing, at the end of the document you will also need to put it through a spell check, which takes a few minutes you then need to follow up with a check by yourself of reading through the text for any missed errors or mistakes (proofreading), this can take a while and needs to be added into the amount of time it takes to complete the task. Do not tell the client you can type 100 pages in a week (5 working days) because then you are leaving yourself with no proofing time, surely you need to proof and check your work before sending it back and this time must be featured in.

Practice proofing so that you know how long it takes you, so that you can give the client a better idea of reaching their deadline or if the deadline needs to change to feature this in. Proof read a page of text and with doing this you should be able to give the client an idea of how long your proofing takes.

Transcribers normally give a client a time of a 1 hour transcription takes ± 3 to 6 hours to transcribe. You also need to feature in proofing time as you need to check for sentence and paragraph construction as well as proofreading and spell checking.

Data entry needs to be checked, it has to be checked for errors and checked that you have the information down correctly.

Checking work has to be part of your time you build into your quotes. Often this is left out and by doing this we do not get paid for this part of the service. Make sure it’s featured as part of your standard terms and conditions.

Every document you complete you need to proofread and check, it’s very unprofessional to send something back to the client without checking it and the client then finds errors. If you are using subcontractors to assist you, do not take it for granted that they will spell check and proof read their work, because often, they do not do this, it is your responsibility to make sure you do this before submitting the work back to the client.

Written by Alison Fourie - AMF Typing Services

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