Tools that editors use
PerfectIt
Shutterstock / Prinkipo / Whitewashed wall with yellow sticky note attached that says ‘consistency is key!’
One of the questions I often receive from clients is ‘How can I reduce the cost of editing?’. Another question is usually, ‘Why didn’t I catch that mistake before I sent it to you?’.
Editors read through a document a number of times, each time concentrating on a specific set of corrections. We also use a number of tools to aid us in our editing tasks.
PerfectIt is one such tool. Created and distributed by Intelligent Editing, PerfectIt is a Word add-on that looks for issues of consistency. These issues can occur in many different aspects of a document, such as spelling, abbreviations, capitalisation and even hyphenation. The program also looks for issues with numbering of tables and figures, whether lists are consistently styled, and many other common consistency traps found in writing.
Examples of the types of errors that PerfectIt finds are:
words that are spelled inconsistently in the document, such as American versus British spellings, or ‘s’ versus ‘z’ spellings
abbreviations that have been used only once, or have been used without spelling them out at first use
words that are not consistently capitalised, including capitalisation of headings
words that have been used both with and without hyphenation
punctuation in lists and bullet points
numbering and styles used in captions.
I also use it to perform tasks such as creating a table of abbreviations, and checking for consistent spaces between sentences.
PerfectIt can be used on both PCs and Macs and is now available in a cloud-based version. One of the most important aspects of PerfectIt for me is the ability to import and create style sheets that are tailored for individual clients. There are also quite a few style sheets already provided in the program, including Australian Government Style, WHO Style, European Union Style and United Nations Style.
A big question amongst users of editing tools is whether to run a document through the program before or after editing. Time permitting, I prefer to run documents through twice: the first time, before editing, I pick up critical and chronic errors that require correcting; and the second time, after editing, I pick up things I may have missed during the editing process.
An editing tool doesn’t replace me as an editor, nor does it work by itself. Each error found using PerfectIt results in a suggested correction, which needs to be considered by the user and either accepted as a correction, or another correction option needs to be chosen (including ignoring the error).
Using PerfectIt allows me to spend more time working with the nuances of language, grammar and tone in documents, and spend less time working out whether an acronym has been spelled out at first use or has been used more than once. This makes my time better value for money for my clients.
