On your first day as an editorial assistant, someone hands you a stack of galley proofs and a pencil, and walks away. The top page has already been visited: a word struck through by a looping scrawl, a caret hovering over a gap like a small bird, the word "stet" standing in the margin with a line of dots beneath it, and a pilcrow pitched in the left margin like a fork. You have a degree in English literature. None of it covered this. By Friday you will be fluent, and within a month you will catch yourself making the marks in the condensation on bus windows.
The marks are a language: compressed, standardized, and older than every piece of software that claims to have replaced them. Like any language, they make far more sense than they first appear to. Here is the vocabulary, where it came from, and why it refuses to die.
Born in hot metal
A proof was a trial printing, and for centuries the person correcting one could not edit the type directly. If you wanted "recieve" fixed, you told the compositor, and the compositor physically swapped slugs of metal. The marks evolved as a protocol between two people who never met, working on the same page at different times, so they had to be fast to write, unambiguous to read, and robust to an editor's midnight handwriting. Several still carry their Latin with them: the delete mark echoes "deleatur," let it be deleted; "stet" means let it stand; the pilcrow, ¶, descends from the marginal signs medieval scribes used to mark a fresh thought, before pages had paragraphs at all.
The marks were eventually collected into standard charts, most famously the British Standard BS 5261 and the chart in The Chicago Manual of Style, which is why an editor in one city can mark a page that gets typeset in another, with no negotiation about what the squiggles mean. If you are new to where proofreading sits among the editing levels, our editing vs. proofreading guide sorts that out first.
The core vocabulary
| The mark on the page | Name | What it means |
|---|---|---|
| A looping stroke through the word, echoed in the margin | Delete | Remove this text |
| "stet" in the margin, dots beneath the affected words | Stet | Cancel my earlier mark; let the original stand |
| Two half-brackets facing each other in a gap: )( | Close up | Delete the space |
| A caret (^) with the addition written above it | Insert | Add this text here |
| A curved loop spanning two words, sometimes "tr" nearby | Transpose | Swap them |
| "sp" in the margin beside an abbreviation | Spell out | "NY" becomes "New York" |
| A bracket linking two paragraphs, "run in" in the margin | Run in | Join them; no paragraph break |
| ¶ (pilcrow) in the left margin | New paragraph | Break here |
| "#" in a gap | Insert space | Add a space |
| Three short strokes under a letter, "cap" in the margin | Cap | Make it a capital |
| "lc" circled in the margin | Lowercase | Make it small |
| One line under a word, "ital" in the margin | Ital | Set in italics |
Two conventions hold the system together. Every mark appears twice, once in the text at the exact spot and once in the margin, so that neither a tired typesetter nor a coffee ring can hide it. And the margin names the change while the text pinpoints the target, which is why a marked page can be read at a glance by someone who has never seen the document before. An editor marking "sp" beside every abbreviation in a long report is issuing the same instruction thirty times, which is why the modern fix is usually a find-and-replace pass instead.
Stet, the courtesy of the undo
The most human mark in the set. A proofreader struck a word, reconsidered, and wants the original back: write "stet" in the margin, dot the underside of the affected text, and the deletion is cancelled. It is the system's undo button, invented centuries before Ctrl+Z, and like Ctrl+Z it can be pressed at the wrong moment.
When an author receives a marked proof, "stet" is also the strongest word available. It says: I saw your change, I decline it, restore what I wrote. Strong words grow etiquette. Answer every query. Never stet silently, because a stet is an assertion of ownership: if you stet "recieve" back into the document, the misspelling now belongs to you, a fate our most commonly misspelled words guide exists to prevent. Editors privately maintain a list of authors who stet everything at midnight and regret it at dawn.
Why the marks outlived the compositors
Tracked changes does most of this work now, and maps onto the old vocabulary almost cleanly:
| The mark | Its tracked-changes equivalent |
|---|---|
| Delete | A struck-through deletion |
| Insert | Inserted text, underlined or colored |
| Transpose | A deletion and an insertion, performed by hand |
| Close up | No equivalent; the space just gets fixed, leaving no record |
| ¶ (pilcrow) | A paragraph mark and a line break |
| Stet | Rejecting the change |
Notice what the mapping reveals. Some marks have no digital equivalent at all: "close up" happens invisibly, with no record that anyone caught anything. And the digital world has states paper never had, like a suggestion accepted by someone who never opened the page. Each medium keeps a record the other loses.
The marks survive anyway, and not out of nostalgia. Legal and academic workflows still circulate hard copy. Editors marking PDFs with a stylus reach for the same loops, because a loop is faster than any menu. A standardized mark can be read cold by any trained editor, in any country, with no version conflicts. And the vocabulary lives on as slang: professionals say "stet that" in email and "lc it" in margins, with no paper in sight.
A word about the handwriting
Page through a marked galley and you will notice that the symbols are confident while the prose is not. This is a feature. Speed matters when you are correcting forty pages against a deadline, and the system was built to survive haste: the meaning lives in the shape of the mark, not the beauty of the letterforms, so a "stet" written at speed into something resembling a lightning bolt still reads perfectly. Marginal queries, the actual sentences, are where handwriting degrades, which is why the convention keeps them short, numbered, and legible enough to answer. An illegible mark is a typo in the protocol. An illegible query is a delay.
Frequently Asked Questions
Are proofreading marks still taught?
Yes, in publishing courses and copyediting training, though less exhaustively than when paper was the only medium. The vocabulary has outlived the workflow: professionals still say "stet" in email with no paper anywhere in sight.
What does "stet" mean?
Latin for "let it stand." Written in the margin with dots beneath the affected text, it cancels an earlier correction and keeps the original wording. It is the strongest word an author has on a marked proof, and the easiest one to regret.
Do I need these marks if I work in Google Docs?
Not required, no. Two reasons remain to learn them: professionals still use them on paper and on stylus-marked PDFs, and knowing the system teaches you what tracked changes is silently recording, and what it quietly isn't.
Which standard should I follow, British or American?
The core dozen marks are effectively identical across the traditions. BS 5261 standardizes the British set, and The Chicago Manual of Style charts the American one. Agree on a reference with your editor before pages start moving, then stay consistent.
What is the most commonly misread mark?
Transposition. People who have never seen the loop assume it is a deletion and retype a word that was merely being swapped. "Close up" runs a close second, because a pair of half-brackets looks like decoration until you have fought a stray space in typeset text.
Can I use the marks on my own writing?
The ritual more than the marks. Proofreading your own work depends on format shifts that break familiarity, and marking a hard copy with a pencil is one of the strongest shifts available, a trick we expand on in how to proofread your own work.
Learn three, then print one page
You do not need the whole chart this week. Learn three marks, delete, stet, and the pilcrow, and you can follow most of any marked page you will ever be handed. Then print one page of your current draft, take up a pencil, and correct it by hand. You will find at least one error the screen was hiding, and for a few minutes you will work the way editors worked when type was made of metal, which is a satisfying way to join a very old line of people who cared about the difference between "receive" and "recieve."