1
Grammar pass: flag “Each of the reports are…” and explain the agreement issue without changing surrounding content.
8 AI Copyediting Checklist Examples
Use these examples to study structure, specificity, tone, and variation. They are demonstrations—not claims about a real person or organization unless the example itself makes that explicit.
Before you copy
What to notice in the examples
A strong workflow breaks copyediting into explicit checks, asks the model to identify rather than silently rewrite problems, protects quotations and technical terms, verifies disputed rules, and performs a final comparison so accepted edits do not change meaning.
- Protection rules: identify quotations, names, technical terms, data, and wording that must not be altered casually.
- Mechanical pass: grammar, punctuation, spelling, capitalization, and agreement.
- Consistency pass: terminology, numbers, dates, headings, abbreviations, and formatting.
- Local clarity pass: ambiguous pronouns, accidental repetition, missing words, or difficult sentence structure.
- Verification pass: confirm factual statements and formal style rules outside the model.
2
Consistency pass: identify mixed use of “e-mail” and “email” and ask the editor which form the style sheet requires.
3
Number pass: flag inconsistent date formats—September 8, 2026 versus 08/09/26—without assuming which standard applies.
4
Quotation protection: leave quoted source wording untouched and flag apparent errors for manual verification rather than correcting the source silently.
5
Pronoun pass: identify “it” in a sentence where two possible antecedents make the meaning ambiguous.
6
Formatting pass: flag headings that use inconsistent capitalization and list levels that skip from 1 to 3.
7
Repetition pass: identify accidental duplicate phrases introduced during revision, such as “the result result shows.”
8
Meaning check: compare original and edited sentence to ensure a punctuation change did not alter who performed the action.
Keep the underlying decision or pattern, then replace the subject, evidence, relationship, constraints, and tone with details that belong to your situation. If your final line still works after swapping only one noun, it may be too close to the example.