Proofreader CV Examples & Writing Guide

A CV for a proofreader who works freelance now and spent three years in-house at a small publisher. The person and the companies are invented. Notice the volumes, the style guides and the turnaround times. Those are the facts a managing editor is looking for.

Proofreading jobs get a lot of applicants, many of whom simply describe themselves as detail-oriented. Four things separate the ones who get a paid test.

• Which style guide, and how well. New Hart's Rules or a house style for UK books, Chicago for many academic presses, a newspaper's own style guide for news, APA or Harvard referencing for social science and academic work, AMA or Vancouver for medical, MHRA for humanities. Naming the edition tells an editor you use it rather than own it.
• Volume and speed. Words a year, pages a week, turnaround on a standard job. This is how editors work out whether you can carry their schedule.
• Subject areas. Medical, legal, financial, technical, academic and localisation work pay differently and need different knowledge. Say what you handle and what you do not.
• Where you work in the process. Proofreading a typeset PDF against a copy-edited manuscript is not the same job as copy-editing a Word file. Say which stage you own, and whether you also do cold reads.

“I hire from the test, not the CV, but the CV decides who gets a test. What gets you one is a real word count, the style guides with editions, and a CV with nothing wrong in it. People get rejected here over a stray double space, and that is fair.”

Three or four lines: years, sectors, style guides, volume and one accuracy or reliability fact. Use a career objective only if you have no paid proofreading work yet.

Proofreading bullets fail when they describe care rather than output. Here is the same work written so an editor can judge it.

• Style guides, with editions: New Hart's Rules, The Chicago Manual of Style, APA, AMA, MHRA, Harvard referencing, plus any house guide you have maintained.
• Stages of the process: proofreading typeset proofs, cold reads, copy-editing, fact and reference checking, permissions, index page checks.
• Page-level checks that mark you as a real proofreader: running heads, folios, widows and orphans, captions, cross-references, prelims, imprint pages.
• Tools: Adobe Acrobat comment and markup, Word Track Changes, Google Docs suggesting mode, InDesign and InCopy, PerfectIt, editing macros, and a reference manager if you handle citations.
• Localisation and translation QA if you do it: memoQ or Trados QA checks, terminology lists, checking translated copy against source.
• Subject knowledge worth naming: medical, legal, financial, academic, technical, education, e-commerce product copy.
• The BS 5261 proofreading marks, if you mark on paper or in PDFs. They are the UK standard, and a UK publisher may ask about them by name.

Leave "attention to detail", "eagle eye" and "perfectionist" off the page. Every applicant writes them, they prove nothing, and they cost you a line you could have spent on a style guide or a subject area.

This is the part most proofreader CVs skip, and it is the part that gets you the paid test. You need evidence, not assurance.

• A portfolio link with two or three before-and-after samples, anonymised, showing your markup and a one-line note on what you changed and why. Put the link in the header, not at the bottom.
• One caught error that mattered, described in a single bullet: a wrong figure, a legal line, a duplicated paragraph, a mismatched caption. Keep the client anonymous if the work was confidential.
• A process sentence. Two passes, a mechanical check, a style sheet per client. Editors trust method more than adjectives.
• Volume and turnaround figures, which double as proof of stamina. Proofreading fails on hour six, not hour one, and hiring editors know it.
• Reliability data: on-time percentage, number of clients retained, repeat work. For freelancers this often matters as much as accuracy.

There is no licence for proofreading, and no employer expects one. What they will not do is hire someone who has never proofread anything. So proofread something before you apply.

1. 1Take one recognised editing course and finish it. A Chartered Institute of Editing and Proofreading (CIEP) course, a Publishing Training Centre course or a university editing certificate all read as serious. The CIEP was the Society for Editors and Proofreaders (SfEP) until 2020, and it also runs membership grades.
2. 2Learn one style guide properly rather than three badly. New Hart's Rules if you want UK books, a newspaper style guide if you want news, APA or Harvard referencing if you want academic work.
3. 3Do real unpaid work with a named output: a charity newsletter, a student newspaper, a local history society, an open-source documentation project. Two or three ongoing commitments, not one favour.
4. 4Build a portfolio of two or three before-and-after samples, using your own volunteer work so there is no confidentiality problem.
5. 5Apply for editorial assistant, production assistant and junior proofreader jobs as well as proofreading roles. In-house entry points into publishing are usually assistant titles.
6. 6Expect a timed test. Practise against the clock with a marked-up text and check what you missed, because the test is where the job is actually decided.

• Freelance: lead with capacity and reliability. Words per year, turnaround times, client types (kept anonymous where needed), on-time percentage, how many clients are repeat. List yourself as "Freelance Proofreader and Copy Editor, self-employed" with a date range, not as a gap.
• Publisher, in-house: lead with titles taken to press, the stage you own, the house style guide and your work with typesetters. Managing editors care about press dates being held.
• Marketing or corporate in-house: lead with channels and brand guidelines. Landing pages, email, packaging, investor and legal copy, and any pre-publish checklist you built. Number the corrections you prevented.
• Agency or localisation vendor: lead with throughput, QA tooling and languages if you check translated copy. Turnaround and query volume matter more than book counts.
• Academic and journals: lead with reference styles, citation checks and the systems you use, plus subjects you can read without slowing down.

• One or two pages. Use the second page only for a long client or title list, under a heading like "Selected Titles" or "Selected Clients".
• Plain reverse-chronological layout, consistent date format, no photo, no date of birth. Consistency in your own CV is being marked.
• Mirror the advert's vocabulary: proofreader, copy-editor, editorial assistant, quality checker, content editor. Several of these hire for the same work under different titles.
• Words that recur in UK adverts: proofread, copy-edit, style guide, house style, New Hart's Rules, BS 5261 marks, Track Changes, InDesign, deadline, accuracy, consistency, query, typeset proofs.
• Put the portfolio link in the header. Editors click it before they read your bullets.
• PDF unless asked otherwise, named firstname-lastname-proofreader-cv.pdf. Check the file name too; it is part of the sample.

Last check before you send: print it, read it out loud, then read it from the bottom up so your eye stops fixing sentences for you. Confirm that every date format matches, every hyphen and dash is the one you meant, and the spacing after every full stop is the same. This is the one job where the reader is grading the document, not just the content.