What is proofreading?
Sending your script to someone to read is stressful. And the more that’s riding on their read, the more stressful it can be. A contest submission? Better do some deep breathing. An agent? Don’t pull out too much hair. A producer? Time for an antacid.
Make sure your script is good, but also that it looks good.
People are only going to read you one time, so the most important thing you can be is, well, ready. And the best way to do that is to make sure your script not only is good, but also that it looks good.
Proofreading is the final—and possibly most important—step in getting your script submission-ready.
After you’ve perfected theme, structure, characters, action, and dialogue, you still need to make sure that anyone reading your script knows you know what you’re doing. And that means making sure the pages are error-free—no misspellings or rogue capitalizations allowed—and in a standard format. As creatively as you write and tell your story, you still want it to look the way people expect scripts to look.
As creatively as you write and tell your story, you still want it to look the way people expect scripts to look.
You can pull a lot of script formatting rules directly from reading screenplays and books on screenwriting—and programs like Final Draft will make sure the basics are covered—but there is a lot of nuance that’s hard to pick up without working in the industry for a while. And, a lot of the screenplays you can find online will be production drafts, with scene numbers and cast lists included, which is not the format in which things are sold.
When you are getting prepared to shoot a film, everyone on set—from the director to the wardrobe department to the set decorators to the grips—need to know how what you’ve got on the page applies to their work. Sluglines, time of day, and capitalized character names all give different essential messages to different crew members, so you need to have them in order and correct. This is true if you’re making the film with friends for $100 on weekends or the next Marvel blockbuster, and it’s led to a pretty codified system, but it’s not one most writers realize they don’t know.
The person who has to ensure that all the scripts are speaking the same language is called the Script Coordinator.
On a TV show, the person who has to ensure that all the scripts are speaking the same language, and all of these elements are aligning, is called the Script Coordinator. At Plot & Page, all of our proofreaders have been Script Coordinators before, and know what is expected and necessary in scripts at all stages of development. They’ve seen, all too well, how even a Co-Executive Producer with a twenty-year resume in network television can still make basic formatting errors consistently, because there’s always been a Script Coordinator there to save them.