Final Proofreading Before Submission

Preparing to submit · 886 words · about 4 minutes to read

A manuscript can be finished for one recipient and unfinished for another on the same afternoon. What changes is not the writing. It is the list the recipient publishes, and the lists are more specific, and more different from one another, than most writers expect.

PLOS ONE accepts manuscripts in DOC, DOCX, or RTF, and requires LaTeX submissions as PDFs. The title page, abstract, and introduction must come first, in that order. The acknowledgments, references, and any supporting information captions must come last, in that order.

The numbers are equally specific. The full title is limited to 250 characters and the short title to 100. The abstract must not exceed 300 words and must not include citations. Sections and subsections are limited to three heading levels, and references follow Vancouver style, numbered in order of appearance and cited in square brackets.¹

The Academy Nicholl Fellowships in Screenwriting publish a list with nothing in common with that one. A feature script must be no shorter than 80 pages and no longer than 125. It must be in standard industry format, which the rules name as 12 point Courier, and the rules note that nonstandard formatting may affect judging. The entrant, not the competition, is responsible for ensuring that no name, address, phone number, or other identifying information appears on the title page or on any other page.²

Princeton University Press asks for something different again. Its proposal guidelines request a brief description of a paragraph or two and a fuller description of one to two pages. They also ask for a chapter outline with a paragraph on each chapter, and for a list of comparable books with title, author, publisher, and year. A CV goes at the end, and sample material is welcome in place of the whole manuscript unless the press has asked for it.³

The final pass is a conformance check, not a reading

Those three lists share a property worth naming: every item on them can be verified without a judgment about quality. A page count is a number, Courier is either the typeface or it is not, and a name on the title page is either there or absent.

That makes the last pass before submission a different operation from editing. It is measured against a document somebody else wrote, and it either conforms or it does not. An hour spent against the list catches things that months of rereading will not, because rereading tests the prose and the list tests the packaging.

It also explains a category of rejection authors find baffling. PLOS ONE states that submissions may be rejected over language standards, missing ethics approvals for human or animal research, or unmet data availability requirements.¹ None of those is a verdict on the research.

The items that break latest, and therefore matter most

Cross-references, numbering, and running heads are the last things to break and the first things to check, because the operation that breaks them is the final reordering. Editors Canada defines proofreading as examining material after layout or in its final format, and includes verifying the consistency of cross-references, running heads, and hyperlinks within it.⁴

References come next. The International Committee of Medical Journal Editors asks authors to give direct references to original research sources wherever possible and to verify references against a bibliographic source such as PubMed or against the original document.⁵ A reference list assembled over three years, in three reference managers, will not survive that check unaided.

Anonymity, where a submission is read blind, is a single fault that cannot be repaired after the fact. The Nicholl rules put the responsibility on the entrant explicitly, and identifying information in a file's own document properties is the version of this that a reader of the printed page will never see.²

Completeness is the last of them, and it is the one that costs the most. The University of Chicago Press states that anything an author plans to have in the book must be submitted before copyediting begins, including all art.⁶ Cornell University Press requires that permission to use any copyrighted material, including an author's own previously published work, be obtained before the final manuscript is submitted.⁷ A manuscript missing one permission cannot go into production at all.

What to do when the list and the habit disagree

Where a recipient publishes a requirement, that requirement outranks the general convention, however well established the convention is. A title page laid out the way every other title page is laid out is still wrong if the competition asked for something else.

Two practical points follow. The list is best read at the start of the final pass rather than at the end, so that the pass is organized around it. A document's own metadata deserves the same pass, since file properties, tracked changes, and comments travel with the file and never appear on the page.

ICMJE's guidance repeatedly directs authors to consult the specific journal they intend to submit to, rather than relying on general recommendations.⁵ That advice generalizes to presses, competitions, committees, and grant bodies alike.

Everything a client sends is treated in confidence, including unpublished manuscripts, submission correspondence, and research data. EditFast will proofread against a recipient's published requirements where a client supplies them, and will report what does not conform. Whether a manuscript is ready on its merits is the author's judgment and their advisors'.

Each of those lists is published, and free to read. They are the cheapest documents in any submission, and usually the last ones a writer opens.

References

PLOS ONE, Submission Guidelines. https://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/submission-guidelines ↩
Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Nicholl Fellowships in Screenwriting, Rules, Eligibility and Terms and Conditions. https://www.oscars.org/nicholl ↩
Princeton University Press, Proposal Guidelines. https://press.princeton.edu/proposal-guidelines ↩
Editors Canada, Definitions of Editorial Skills, June 2019. https://editors.ca/hire-an-editor/skills/ ↩
International Committee of Medical Journal Editors, Recommendations: Preparing a Manuscript for Submission to a Medical Journal. https://www.icmje.org/recommendations/browse/manuscript-preparation/preparing-for-submission.html ↩
University of Chicago Press, Manuscript Preparation Guidelines. https://press.uchicago.edu/resource/emsguide.html ↩
Cornell University Press, Author Guidelines. https://www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/author-guidelines/ ↩

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