Objective
To enhance the quality and efficiency of the final deliverables.
Reduce the risk of too many errors.
Gain customer loyalty.
Maintain consistency by following the same information, methods, and skills in a consistent manner. Ensure the document’s content, style, and format are of high quality..
Revise the written material to improve readability and suitability.
Ensure that the text is free of grammatical and factual errors.
Tools of the QC Check
To ensure that the quality of the document after the review is consistent, a QC checklist is available, which is a valuable tool. In addition, the document template, style guide (covering text styles, punctuations, abbreviations, capitalization, number, and date formats, etc.), source documents (data tables, protocol, protocol summary, statistical analysis plan, clinical study reports, depending on the type of document to be reviewed), authoring instructions, a standard operating procedure for QC, and much more is in place for the checks.
- Formatting is an important part of QC that includes styles, page layout, pagination, headers, and footers.
- General: grammar check, spellings, abbreviations, table of contents.
- Consistency includes synopsis, summary, and conclusions versus the main body of the document, tabular data in the text.
- References: correct citations, format in-text citations, and reference list.
- Tables are properly formatted, and the layout is checked. Consistency in style of tables throughout the document, clarity of presentation, caption style, cross-references, sources are correctly cited, and content is matched to the source.
Copy-Editing
The main aim of copy-editing is to remove obstacles between the reader and what the author wants to convey and solve the problems before a manuscript/book/any document goes to the typesetter. Computer software are, nowadays, becoming useful tools for authors; however, they cannot read for sense, repetition, or uncertainty. The software cannot pick factual errors or incorrect information. Thus, copy-editing is the process of revising the already written material to improve readability and suitability and ensuring that the text is free of grammatical and factual errors.
It comprises mechanical editing that includes sentence-level stylistic and line editing and substantive editing that includes rewriting the sentences for clarity, complex tables and figures with wrong data, unstructured passages, inaccurately constructed sentences, and subject-verb disagreements. The copyeditor is the reader’s advocate and the author’s ambassador (Butcher’s Copy-editing by Judith Butcher, Caroline Drake, and Maureen Leach).
