A Simple Pre-Publication Checklist Worth Keeping

Most errors that make it into print are not the result of poor reporting. They happen in the final stretch, when a writer is tired, the deadline is close, and small details get waved through on the assumption that they were already checked somewhere earlier. A short, consistent routine at the end of the process catches the majority of these before they cause harm.

We ask course and clinic participants to build a personal version of this routine and run it every time, without exception, regardless of how confident they feel about the piece. Confidence is, if anything, a reason to slow down rather than skip the check — the pieces we trust most are often the ones we scrutinize least.

What the routine actually covers

The checklist itself is short by design. A long list gets skipped under pressure; a short one gets used. At minimum it should confirm that every quoted line matches the original notes exactly, that names and titles are spelled the way the source spells them, and that any number or date in the piece has been checked against a second source rather than trusted from memory.

Where a piece makes a claim about a person or organization that could be disputed, the routine should also confirm that a genuine opportunity for reply was offered with enough time to respond. This step is sometimes skipped when a deadline is tight, and it is precisely then that it matters most.

Building the habit into the workflow

The routine works best when it has a fixed place in the process rather than floating as an optional last step. Some writers we work with run it immediately after their editor's final read; others prefer it before the piece ever reaches an editor, so that the draft arriving for review is already clean. Either order works, as long as the check happens every time and isn't quietly dropped when the schedule tightens.

We share a downloadable version of this checklist with everyone in the Reporting Fundamentals Course and the Editorial Clinic Series, adapted slightly for different kinds of reporting. The version itself matters less than the discipline of using it consistently.