Government Office for Science (Go-Science) – editing and proofreading

We were tasked to edit and proofread a suite of 30 research reports that looked at different aspects of transport in the UK. These Foresight reports were intended to inform future government policy.

They were aimed at ‘lay’ readers who were not familiar with the technical detail. The problem was that they were written by different academics. They therefore varied in editorial style, tone, length and format.

Our job was to ensure that they all looked and read like a suite of reports. They needed to be clear and easy to understand; free of grammar and spelling mistakes; consistent in presentation and style; and laid out in Go-Science’s brand templates.

The reports – which varied between 5,000 and 25,000 words – had to be edited in Microsoft Word. They all needed two editing ‘runs’ which had to be completed within eight weeks.

We put together a team of five editors who completed the task within the two-month deadline. Although each editor worked alone, our project manager ensured a consistent and uniform approach was applied to all the reports. All work was carried out using Word’s ‘track changes’ and issues were flagged up using the ‘comment’ tool. In addition, we produced editing query sheets for each report. These ensured that the client could address or answer each query in a consistent and logical way.

Feedback was very positive. The client lead stated that our team had carried out the correct level of editorial intervention, ironing out poor or unclear passages while maintaining the integrity of the authors’ original text.