how long to proof read 65,000 words?

[hatwoman]

tbh it's more than a proof read...it's a quite heavily referenced/footnoted that needs all footnotes consistently formatted too. plus a full, consistent bibliography finalising - draft bib is 3500 words. I need a rough professional opinion on how big a job this as i suspect some one involved in the project thinks it's an afternoons work

sneaky bump

proof reading for grammatical/spelling errors or for research errors?

formatting too? to what standard?

Definitely not an afternoon's work. More like two or three days I would say, and that's for a fairly light level of corrections. If you end up having to rewrite bits, or query lots of missing references, plus formatting, that's more copy-editing than proof-reading, and takes about 50 per cent longer.

I would give it a week but footnotes are my particular bugbear!

thanks all. policy - that's about what i'd think too. it's well written, and doesn't need checking for research errors. but it does need the consistency of the references, checking for acronyms, cross references, etc plus grammatical/spelling errors (which will be of the typo-kind not the badly written kind, iyswim)

yeah I reckon 3 - 4 days, depending on how much time you spending making coffee and mumsnetting

Yes, sounds more like a copy-edit, albeit a fairly straightforward one.

When I used to work in magazine publishing I'd generally allocate about 15min per thousand words for proofing, but that was for articles from experienced writers who didn't need a lot of editting or cross-referencing.

For what you say you need to do I'd budget for at least 30min/1000words.

Hiya I do freelance editing and proofreading, and normally can get through 3000-5000 words per hour for a straightforward proofread...
Iarose