Assemble and build the editing checklist

An editing checklist keeps the depth of a review consistent, records what has been checked and what is left, and lets an interrupted edit be picked up again. It can be specific to a document type or generic, and its items check a document against itself and against its sources; a writer editing their own work can pair a general checklist with one for the genre. An editor builds one from a document type met often, tests it until it works consistently, and writes each item to show how the element should look.

What a checklist buys and costs

Checklists are a vital component of many professions, such as aviation, construction and medicine. ¹ Many publishing professionals use checklists to make sure that small and large tasks are completed before publication, but not all editors use editing checklists to guide their daily tasks. ¹ Most pharmaceutical companies and contract research organisations have their own standards for producing documents, and a checklist may be available to keep the quality and level of detail of a quality-control review consistent; a detailed checklist is an important tool: it helps the reviewer cover all aspects of a review and keep track of what has been checked and what is left to do, which in turn helps the reviewer manage their time. ²

Editors are asked to edit more documents in less time with the same level of care, and editing in a hurried state interferes with the average editor's ability to edit closely, read carefully and remember the many small things that need checking. ¹ An editing checklist can bring back focus by making evident what has been done and, more importantly, what is still to be done. ¹ Atul Gawande's The Checklist Manifesto does not name editing or writing among the activities that could benefit from a checklist, but many of its reasons for checklists apply to editors as well. ¹ In Gawande's account, experts in a complex environment face two main difficulties: the fallibility of memory and attention on mundane, routine matters that are easily overlooked under the strain of more pressing events, and the way people lull themselves into skipping steps even when they remember them. ¹ Checklists seem to provide protection against such failures: they remind people of the minimum necessary steps and make them explicit, and they offer the possibility of verification and instil a kind of discipline of higher performance. ¹

A generic editing checklist can cover the many types of document an editor handles in a given job, and a checklist tailored to a type of document met regularly is especially effective for three kinds of document. ^{1, 3} The first is short documents that are quite similar, where it can be difficult to remember what has been done in each as the day goes on; in Gawande's words, the checklist gets the dumb stuff out of the way, the routines the brain should not have to occupy itself with, and lets it rise above to focus on the hard stuff. ^{3, 4} The second is documents that must adhere to a strict format: where the formatting elements were presented poorly or in many different formats or locations, investigating the current format after forgetting which project has which heading levels or how a document spells a particular term can be time-consuming, and with the correct format shown visually in the checklist it is much quicker to verify it and continue. ^{3, 5} The third is documents edited within processes or styles that change often: a checklist that walks the editor through the current process, kept updated as things change, tells them they are following the right process, and keeping it up to date with style changes, which may come often especially in a new project, spares them second-guessing themselves. ^{3, 6}

An editing checklist can also raise productivity, in two ways. ⁷ Its items stand in an order tested to be optimal, which gives the task a structure the editor moves through more quickly: the edit begins and ends in the same place, so the editor knows that everything required in between has been done. ⁷ And after an interruption, the last item ticked shows which task the editor was working on, and the ability to quickly pick up where one left off can increase productivity and motivation. ⁷ In a 2011 survey of members of the AMWA writing and editing e-mail list and the Society for Technical Communication's technical editing special interest group list, the 176 respondents split about evenly into thirds who used editing checklists, who did not, and who sometimes did. ⁷ One respondent used checklists because they make editing faster and less dependent on sharpness or mood on a given day, and another called a checklist a good place to start for someone who tends to jump into a piece too quickly. ⁷ Creating a checklist requires an upfront investment of time, but Gawande reports that it is time well spent. ⁷ The director of a major fund company in his book expected a checklist to slow his team down, increasing the time and work its investment decisions required, and was prepared to pay that price, the benefits of making fewer mistakes seeming obvious; it did increase the upfront work time, but to his surprise the team evaluated many more investments in far less time overall. ⁷ The checklist had made the team much more methodical in its steps and discussions, which made it more confident in its decisions because it knew it had done the required work, and its analysis was more objective because it was following the checklist instead of getting tied up in factors that could play on its emotions. ⁷

One editor finds that editors asked why they do not use editing checklists cannot really say, and guesses that it probably has something to do with reasons The Checklist Manifesto gives: some physicians were offended at the suggestion that they needed checklists, and like physicians, many editors may believe their jobs too complicated to reduce to a checklist. ⁸ But a checklist holds particular editing tasks, not the job. ⁸ Aviation checklists leave out many actions because experience has shown that professional pilots virtually never fail to perform them when necessary, so they do not tell pilots how to fly a plane; likewise, an editing checklist does not teach anyone how to edit, but helps an experienced editor keep track of the details of particular types of document. ⁸ A tested, up-to-date editing checklist can increase efficiency and provide peace of mind. ⁸

What a checklist covers

A quality-control checklist can be specific to a document type, such as separate lists for protocols, clinical study reports and manuscripts, or generic, covering what should be checked in any document. ⁹ The main topics a quality-control checklist should include, with examples, are formatting, such as styles, page layout, pagination, and headers and footers; consistency, such as between the synopsis, summary or conclusions and the main body, of text and message through the main body, of tabular data quoted in the text, and, in a protocol, between the schedule-of-assessments table and the text, a common source of consistency errors; tables, such as their formatting and layout, consistency of style across the document, clarity of presentation, caption style, electronic cross-references, and sources correctly cited with matching content; references, such as correct citations, the format of in-text citations and of the reference list, and the completeness of the list; and general items such as accuracy against source documents and data, spelling and grammar, sentence construction, abbreviations and the table of contents. ^{9, 2}

The checklist that one technical editor follows for quality control of clinical documents includes glaring mistakes or issues, grammar, punctuation, consistency and compliance with the style guide. ¹⁰ It also compares parts of the document against each other and against their sources: the abbreviations list against the synopsis, the schedule of assessments against the study activities, in-text tables against the data source, in-text tables against the data within the text, and the table of contents against the text. ¹⁰ All references for tables and figures are checked, with hyperlinks followed as needed. ¹⁰

Checklists can help a writer edit their own work thoroughly and efficiently. ¹¹ A writer can consider using a general checklist together with one for the genre, such as a scientific paper, a grant proposal or an article for general readers, and can individualise each to the writing task and to the pitfalls they tend to face; a genre checklist can readily be adapted to the type of paper, proposal or article being written. ^{11, 12, 13, 14} A general checklist for editing one's own work asks these questions: ¹¹

1. Is the content complete, or should any content be added?
2. Should any content be deleted?
3. Is all the content accurate?
4. Is all the logic sound?
5. Do the content and crafting of the piece suit the audience?
6. Does the piece follow appropriate conventions regarding overall format?
7. If subheadings are allowed, are they used effectively?
8. Are sections and paragraphs of appropriate length?
9. Should any tables or figures be added or deleted?
10. If tables or figures are included, are they well designed?
11. Would typographic devices, such as italics or bullets, be helpful anywhere?
12. Is the piece well organised at various levels?
13. Are grammar, spelling, punctuation and usage correct throughout?
14. Are verb tenses appropriate?
15. Are antecedents of all pronouns clear?
16. Have abbreviations and acronyms been defined, and are all of them worth using?
17. Are sentences of appropriate length and structure?
18. Are numbers, if any, in the correct style? Are all units of measure suitable?
19. If references are cited, are they in the appropriate format? Do all cited references appear in the reference list, and are all listed references cited in the text?
20. Is the writing clear, exact and concise?
21. Have all instructions been followed?

¹⁵

The form a checklist takes

Each item of a quality-control checklist should have a tick box, and a comment box where the reviewer can explain why an item was not checked and describe specific findings. ¹⁶ A general comments section at the start or the end is useful, for example to explain that only certain parts of the document were reviewed. ¹⁶ The checklist should also record the reviewed document's version number and date with its title, project code or other identifiers, and give space to sign and date the form when the review is complete; it may also give the author space to sign off on implementing the comments or to respond to them. ¹⁶ A signature page should also be included, as part of the checklist or separate from it, to document that the review has taken place. ¹⁶

Building and testing a checklist

Where no quality-control checklist exists, a reviewer can create one, beginning with a brainstorming session about document formatting, style, grammar and punctuation, and consistency of text and data between the synopsis, the main body and the conclusions. ⁹ Any guidelines or checklists already at hand can be combined into it; useful resources include style guides such as the AMA Manual of Style and, for reporting trials and manuscripts, the CONSORT and ICMJE guidelines. ¹⁶

An editing checklist is built from a type of document the editor edits often, with similar formats and styles and a need for similar levels or kinds of edit. ¹⁷ The editor edits a representative document with a blank sheet of paper beside them and writes down everything the edit involves apart from the reading itself: not the analysis of organisation or the cleaning up of sentences, but every formatting item checked, such as the headings and page numbers. ¹⁷ The aim is easy wins: style or formatting issues that creep in, such as two spaces after a full stop or a missing serial comma, and issues so important that, though rarely wrong, they would be really embarrassing if they were, such as the spelling of the company or a product name. ¹⁷ The checklist also records the formatting issues and errors common to the document type, its unique style issues such as deviations from house style, and the mechanical actions every document of the type needs, such as running the spell check or saving the edited file in a particular location or under an appended name. ¹⁷ Once the draft is good, its items are put in the order the editor would optimally perform them, for example starting with the headings, moving to scanning for abbreviations, and ending with fixing references and checking spelling, with tick boxes for each item and space for notes at the end. ¹⁷ The editor then prints it, edits another document of the type with it, edits the checklist along the way by adding things routinely checked but missing from it, and repeats with the updated checklist on the next document. ¹⁷

Testing follows the advice that a writer of aviation checklists for Boeing gave Gawande: first drafts always fall apart, and one needs to study how, make changes, and keep testing until the checklist works consistently. ¹⁸ Testing asks what is working, what is not, and what the editor forgot to do or to document, and the checklist is edited until it includes all the formatting and style items that could reasonably go on it. ¹⁸ It does not recreate the style guide; it holds mainly the items that the writers the editor works with often get wrong, that the editor often forgets to check, or that are too important to risk not checking, and in creating it the editor is essentially affirming what is important to check and how some of those items should look. ¹⁸ Pilots use checklists because they trust them to work when they need them, and editors can likewise create dependable checklists that are accurate and up to date and that walk them through their current processes. ¹⁸

A good item shows how the element should look, so the checklist can act as a cheat sheet for items such as heading levels, headers and footers. ^{18, 19} Where a bad item says check heading levels, a good one names them: level 1 bold, level 2 underlined, level 3 italic, level 4 italic and underlined. ¹⁹ Check abbreviations becomes ensuring that abbreviations carry no full stops and that abbreviations and acronyms are defined on first use, and check font becomes body text in 12 pt Times New Roman and table text in 10 pt Times New Roman. ¹⁹ With the copyediting items cleared out of the way, the substantive edit can be done without those distractions. ¹⁸

A checklist is working when the editor feels lost starting a new project without one, finds an error it said to look for, and feels their edits are consistently more thorough and faster, confident of having done all they can in the time allotted. ²⁰ It is kept as a living document, added to whenever something turns up that will be worth checking in future documents, and can always be refined to keep it comprehensive but concise. ⁹