If you come to us looking for editing, we expect that you’ve self-edited your manuscript several times on your own before passing it over to have it polished for a better reader experience.  We expect to restructure sentences, move chunks of sentences around for flow, delete bits here and there, and perhaps even write additional chunks.  Please be assured, though, that we will not change your voice – if you would normally write “they could smell her perfume as she entered the room”, we’re absolutely not going to add something like “she entered the room, making her presence known immediately as her sweet fragrance permeated the air and invaded their senses”.

A proofread, however, is your last line of defence (or defense, depending on your location) before your manuscript is unleashed to the world.  It would have been self-edited, as before, and then passed over to one (or more) professional editors for them to make all necessary changes.  Since no editor (or proofreader) is infallible, your proofread will take care of anything that was overlooked during the editing process.  In most cases, a proofread deals mainly with punctuation and the occasional typo.  Now and again, there’ll be a missing word, a doubled-up word, or even an incorrect word.  It’s highly unlikely that entire sentences will be rewritten, but it may happen sparingly.  A proofread is, in simple terms, a final spit and polish prior to publication.

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