Whoever edited this delightful tale did an excellent job, great decision to engage a professional editor. Now I am excited to employ my laser-like focus and identify even the slightest blemish for you to polish before your lucky readers get their hands on it.

The proofreading process requires addressing a manuscript in a very different way to other forms of editing and will require two full passes of your novel.

The first will be to simply enjoy your terrific story and highlight anything that jolts me out of my immersion. The second pass won’t be reading but will be scrutinising every word and spotting any spelling, punctuation or grammatical errors that may have passed under the radar.

Proofreading reports can be very variable in length depending on what is identified and how much editing your novel has been through. Most of the action is directly tracked in your manuscript.

The report will provide a summary paragraph and detailed margin annotations and frequent in-line comments regarding your:

• Spelling, punctuation and grammar
• Phrasing, repetition and sentence syntax
• Dialogue tags
• Point of view consistency
• Paragraph structure
• Overall formatting