For Copyeditor / Proofreader (Freelance / Publishing)s ·
What you'll accomplish
At proof stage the author sends a list, the in-house editor sends another, and you have your own. The same fix appears twice, one fix contradicts another, and none of it is in page order. Retyping three lists into one is slow and a retyping slip becomes a new error. Claude merges the lists into one sorted by page and line, combines duplicates, and marks disagreements as CONFLICT with both versions shown. It resolves nothing. You do.
What you'll need
Before you paste real lists. Correction lists quote the unpublished text, and they carry the author's decisions. Your contract, or your managing editor, decides whether lists like these may go into an AI tool, and the answer may be no. Try the workflow first on the invented lists in this guide. If real lists are allowed, shorten quoted words to the minimum, replace the author and title with codes, and check your account's setting for whether chats are used to train models and how long they are kept.
What you should see: Lists that look alike in layout, each with a source label. Troubleshooting: If a correction has no line number, write "no line" so Claude does not guess one.
Open a new Claude chat. A Project is not needed for a single merge.
Paste the instruction from "Your First Real Task", then the lists below it, each under its source label.
Look for the three kinds of line: one source only, two or more sources that agree, and CONFLICT.
Three lists:
Merge these three correction lists (E editor, A author, P proofreader) the same way. Sort by page and line. Mark a CONFLICT whenever any two disagree about the same page and line, and show every version.
Format for the typesetter:
Reformat this final list as one correction per line: page, line, "from" text, "to" text. Change no wording. Mark anything that has no line number.
Count check:
Count the corrections in each source list and in the merged list. Show the arithmetic from the lists to the merged total.
List the conflicts only:
From the merged list, show only the CONFLICT lines with every version and its source. Do not suggest which is right.