The PTC Basic Proofreading Course – A Review
Updated: Oct 28, 2022
What this post on the PTC Basic Proofreading course covers:
The topics in the PTC Basic Proofreading course
My personal experience of the course
How my clients benefited
From October 2019–July 2020 I completed the Publishing Training Centre’s Essential Proofreading course. The course aims to take you from being an absolute beginner at proofreading to being ready to work for publishers [disclaimer: I was not an absolute beginner!]. It is an online self-study course (around 50 hours) with tutor feedback. The course has five sections (and a short introductory section). Each section contains study notes, lots of exercises to complete and a tutor-assessed task.
What the PTC Basic Proofreading course covers
The first section includes making track changes in MS Word. It underscores the difference between proofreading from a publisher’s perspective and when a student, researcher or member of the public asks for a “proofread” or “language edit”. Publishers often ask you to complete copyediting in MS Word, but to use PDF or paper proofs to proofread.
The second section deals with proofreading on screen with PDF proofs (using markup tools). The third and fourth sections focus on learning the BSI proofreading symbols.
The final chapter revises the most important points (e.g. ensuring you know your hyphens from your en and em dashes) and outlines the entire publishing process. The Publishing Training Centre has since updated the course to include more exercises on proofreading on PDFs and online self-publishing.
Why take the course?
I run an editorial business. Most of my work is in fiction editing, with a little academic editing too. While I had learned a great deal on the job, I had had little formal training in editorial work. I therefore wanted to ensure I had all bases covered and understood all aspects of the publishing process.
For this reason, I started my formal editorial training with a proofreading course, despite not intending to work as a professional proofreader. Several of the skills learnt (looking for grammar and editorial errors) are key to being a good copyeditor too. So, scoring highly in these categories on this course improved my confidence in my work. Besides this, the course covered a wide range of texts, from public information leaflets to academic and medical texts and fiction. My experience has mostly been with academic texts and policy reports. These exercises therefore improved my confidence in taking on a wider variety of editorial projects. I learnt that my skills could be applied to other fields. I was particularly strong at spotting errors. However, I had to be careful not to make unnecessary interventions or author queries. I also learnt that I was better working on paper than on screen!
How my clients benefited
Some of the skills specific to proofreading also improved my work completed for existing clients. Clients often ask me to copyedit political policy papers and reports, which are then typeset and formatted, usually by a graphic designer. Clients sometimes then ask me to do one final check through (not a full proofread). I was able to better spot errors with layout, e.g. with rectos and versos, indented paragraphs etc. after completing this course. The result – these final reports were more professionally presented. These “small” differences can have an impact on whether a reader takes a text seriously or not.
The course gave me the exciting chance to work on a fiction text. I learnt about some other issues that emerge in fiction proofreading as compared with non-fiction texts. The feedback on the five assessments really improved the quality of my editorial work too.
Tips and recommendations
My recommendation for this course is to go slow: had I solely focused on becoming a proofreader, I would have repeated more of the exercises and perhaps used the full allotted twelve months to complete the course. Whenever I rushed a section, my marks slipped. It is worth remembering that each assessed text contains many more errors than you would expect in a regular piece of copy, and so it is worth slowing down and looking at each text several times with a fresh pair of eyes.
The course focuses on UK English language varieties and I would have liked to see a little more guidance on US/UK distinctions in the course materials (US English standards generally seem slightly more prescriptive, with numerous style guides, while UK English has taken on many structures and forms from US English language varieties). A little more diversity of background in the texts would also have been nice. I especially thought about this as the Black Lives Matter protests began to have a big impact on the editorial communities I belong to.
Overall, I enjoyed the course and scored a merit. I feel this training has helped me lay a stable foundation that will boost my confidence when completing the next parts of my editorial/publishing training: the CIEP Copyediting Suite and PTC Creative Copywriting courses. The publishing sector recognises the PTC and CIEP courses as valuable, so this will help me with finding future work with publishers. And learning the proofreading symbols was fun too!
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Andrew Hodges, PhD is a copyeditor and developmental editor who specializes in editing fiction for science fiction and fantasy writers. His expertise is in worldbuilding and cultural considerations when crafting setting in stories.
He is an advanced professional member of the CIEP, a member of the EFA, and an ALLi partner member.
You can contact him here, or feel free to leave a comment below!