Ten More Handwritten Editing Marks

My previous post “Ten Handwritten Editing Marks” demonstrated the copyediting and proofreading marks for deletions, insertions, transposed letters, paragraphs, periods, commas, apostrophes, quotation marks, capitalization, and lowercasing. Today’s post demonstrates ten more handwritten editing marks: parentheses, spaces, bold font, italic font, remove formatting, en dashes, em dashes, close spaces, hyphens, and stet.

Each mark is described below the graphic.

Parentheses: Parentheses marks are two curved lines surrounding the parenthetical text. Each curved line is accented with two horizontal lines.

Space: The space mark is a circled pound sign (also called a number sign, hashtag, and octothorpe). For clarity, also place a line through the spot where the space should appear.

Bold: The bold mark is a squiggly line under the word that should be bold.

Italic: The italic mark is a straight line under the word that should be italicized.

Remove formatting: The remove formatting mark is a circle around the bold or italicized word that should be changed to the text’s normal font style.

En dash: The en dash mark is an underlined capital N positioned directly above the spot where the en dash should appear.

Em dash: The em dash is an underlined capital M positioned directly above the spot where the em dash should appear.

Close: The close mark is a set of small curved lines above and below the unnecessary space. Some editors only use the top close mark.

Hyphen: The hyphen mark is two horizontal lines. For clarity, place an insertion mark between the letters where the hyphen should appear.

Stet: The stet mark indicates that the original text shouldn’t be edited (or, at least not edited as it is marked). The stet mark is a small dot under each letter of the word that should be maintained. Because small dots are easily overlooked, also write and circle the word stet in the margin.

If editing on paper isn’t your style, check out “How to Use Track Changes in Microsoft Word” for an overview of editing in Microsoft Word and “How to Use Adobe Acrobat DC’s Comment and Mark-Up Tools” for an overview of editing in Adobe Acrobat DC.