For Copyeditor / Proofreader (Freelance / Publishing)s ·
What you'll accomplish
The character who is thirty-four in chapter 3 and thirty-five in chapter 7. The street spelled two ways. You catch some of these as you read, but chapter 18 is a long way from chapter 2. Here you upload one chapter at a time and ask Claude for a table of names, places, dates, ages and numbers with where each appears. You combine the tables in a spreadsheet, sort them, and the conflicts sit side by side. Every conflict becomes a query. Nothing changes silently.
What you'll need
Before you upload a chapter. The manuscript is the author's or publisher's until it is published. Your contract, or your managing editor, decides whether you may upload any of it to an AI tool, and some contracts forbid it or ask you to disclose. If the answer is no, do not upload. Practise on the invented chapters in this guide, or on a passage you wrote yourself. If the answer is yes, check your account's privacy setting for whether chats and uploads are used to train models and how long they are kept, and swap the title and author for codes in the file name. Leave out memoir chapters about real people unless the editor says it is fine.
A whole book is more than a chat holds reliably. Claude's own help page also suggests dividing larger files into smaller sections. So split the book by chapter and handle each separately, even though file limits may be larger than a chapter.
Use a normal Claude chat, not a Project, so the chapters do not pile up in one place.
What you should see: The file name shown above the message box. Troubleshooting: If Claude says it cannot read the file, convert it to DOCX or PDF with selectable text. Embedded images in a DOCX are not read.
Paste the prompt from "Your First Real Task". Ask for the same columns every time, so the tables stack.
It will miss items. Skim the chapter and add any name or number it skipped.
Names and terms only:
List every recurring character name and every spelling of it in the attached chapter, with the paragraph where each form first appears. Do not choose a form.
Timeline:
List every date, year, season and age in the attached chapter in the order they appear, with the paragraph. Do not work out whether they agree.
Numbers and units:
List every number and unit of measure, exactly as written, with the paragraph. Mark whether it is written as numerals or words.
Check a combined table:
Here are the combined tables. Which items have more than one form or value across chapters? List them. Do not decide which is right.