The Short Story Proofreading Checklist: 15 Things to Check Before You Submit

You have typed the last line. The story feels finished, and that is exactly when the trouble starts, because "finished" and "ready to send" are two different things. A proofreading pass is not about rewriting your plot or second-guessing your voice. It is about clearing away the small distractions that pull an editor out of the story: a character's name spelled two ways, a comma in the wrong spot, a shift into present tense halfway down a paragraph.

What follows is a checklist for that final pass. Work through it once, slowly, and your submission will read like it was written by someone who reads their own work carefully. It was.

Consistency: the details readers remember

Readers forgive a great deal. They rarely forgive contradiction. Before you touch a single comma, check that the story agrees with itself.

• Names and spellings. Is your protagonist Marianne on page one and Marion on page six? Does the dog change from Biscuit to Baskerville between scenes?
• Physical details. Eye colour, hair, height, an accent, an old injury. A character who limps in chapter one should not jog downstairs in chapter three.
• Timeline. Days of the week, seasons, ages, how long ago something happened. If it is "three years since the funeral" early on, it cannot be two years later in the same week of story time.
• Objects and places. Where is the letter now? Is the shop on the corner of Mill Street or Market Street? Did the car keys stay in the kitchen?
• Weather and light. Rain that stops and starts without explanation, or a sunset in the middle of a morning scene, breaks the spell quietly.

The fastest way to catch these is a style sheet: a plain document listing names, spellings, physical facts, dates and place names. Build it as you proofread, and keep it for the next story featuring the same characters.

Tense, time and point of view

Tense slips are the most common error in otherwise clean manuscripts, and they hide in plain sight. Read this: She walks into the kitchen and poured herself a coffee. Most writers skim straight past it. Slow down on every verb and ask whether it belongs in the tense you have chosen.

Flashbacks are where tense wobbles most. If your story is in past tense and you drop into a memory, either keep that memory in past perfect (she had taken the train) and then ease out of it, or signal the shift clearly with a scene break or a line of white space. Do not drift in and out mid-paragraph and leave the reader to work out which "now" they are in.

Point of view deserves the same attention. If you are writing close third person, your viewpoint character cannot know what another character is thinking. Watch for sentences that quietly hand the camera to someone else: Daniel wondered whether she was lying. Fine. Daniel wondered whether she was lying, unaware that she had already called the police. Not fine.

UK spelling and the small conventions

If you are submitting to a British publication, write in British English and be consistent about it. Check for:

-ise, not -ize. Realise, organise, recognise, apologise. The -ize ending is a legitimate Oxford style, but mixing the two within one manuscript is not.

Double the consonant. Travelled, cancelled, labelled, marvellous, counsellor, fuelled.

The classic traps. Practise is the verb, practice the noun. Licence is the noun, license the verb. Defence, offence, pretence, grey, towards, afterwards.

Quotation marks are a matter of house style. British fiction has traditionally used single marks with doubles for quoted speech inside them, but plenty of UK editors prefer doubles. Whatever you choose, apply it without exception, and check the submission guidelines first.

Dialogue punctuation, done properly

This is where careful writers still get tripped up, so take it slowly.

Punctuation belongs inside the quotation marks. 'Where are you going?' she asked. 'Not far,' he said. Note the lower-case she and he: the dialogue tag is part of the same sentence.

Dialogue tags versus action beats. A tag tells us who spoke: she said, he asked, they whispered. An action beat is something a character does. Tags take a comma and a lower-case pronoun. Action beats take a full stop and a capital letter.

'Sit down,' she said. (tag)
'Sit down.' She pulled out a chair. (action beat)

New speaker, new paragraph. Every time. It is the single clearest way to show who is talking.

Interruptions and trailing off. Use an em dash for a sentence cut short and an ellipsis for a voice fading away. Do not use three full stops and an ellipsis interchangeably.

Attribution clutter. Said is invisible, which is a compliment. If a line of dialogue needs he interjected or she expostulated to work, the line probably needs rewriting instead.

Formatting your manuscript

Presentation will not save a weak story, but poor presentation can sink a good one before it is read. Standard novel and short story formatting is simple:

1. Use one readable font at twelve point, black on white, with 1.5 or double line spacing.
2. Indent the first line of each paragraph, or block your paragraphs with a space between them. Do not do both.
3. Mark scene breaks with a centred symbol or three asterisks, spaced away from the text.
4. Number your pages and put your surname and the story title in the header.
5. Include a title page with your name, contact details and word count, and check whether the market wants your name on the manuscript itself.
6. Follow the submission guidelines to the letter, including file format and how the story should be sent.

Then hunt for the leftovers: double spaces between sentences, stray tabs, curly and straight apostrophes mixed together, italics that do not survive the file conversion, and that one paragraph still sitting in a different font because you pasted it in three weeks ago.

The final read-through

Once the technical work is done, read the story once more for sound. Read it aloud, or let your device read it to you; your ear catches what your eye skips. Change the font size, read it on a phone screen, or print it out. Leave it overnight if you can, then read it as though a stranger had written it and you owe them nothing.

When you finish, ask a single question: is there anything here that makes the reader stop and think about the writing rather than the story? If the answer is no, you are ready. Save a clean copy, name the file sensibly, and send it out.

Photo: SamuelFJohanns / Pixabay