Should You Revise Digitally or by Hand?
A call for evidence-based editing
Ever since the internet ruined all our lives, we’ve had to deal with the eternal question when it comes time to proofread and revise the first draft: is it better to edit digitally or by hand?
Over the course of my editing career, I’ve gotten lots of advice from much more skilled editors and professors about what they think the best practices are for keeping typos few and far between. But at the same time, I’m never sure where they got their advice in the first place. When I was getting my editing certification through the American Copy Editors Society, one of the featured panelists said digital markup is better than editing by hand because you can increase the font, zoom in, change the text color, and do any number of things to make different typos pop out at you in different ways. In another case, my coworkers were at a journalism conference in DC, where industry professionals analyzed a newspaper I used to edit. The copy desk’s main suggestion was that if I stopped editing by hand, we’d make workflow more productive and decrease errors. The offered explanation was the same: We can work with larger fonts and see the copy easier.
On the surface, all this makes sense, and I can anecdotally confirm that fonts can be an issue. But in both experts’ cases, they didn’t cite…
