Proofreading before you submit
Work through this before you submit a finished book. Proofread each recipe as you save it too, but this is the pass that catches what reading one recipe at a time misses.
Proofread each recipe before you save it, and proofread the whole book against the book itself before you submit. Typos, wrong categories, and a New Ingredients entry with nothing to match it are visible on screen. Missing ingredients, missing accompaniments, and missing recipes are not. Those only turn up when you compare each entry to the page.
Pay closest attention to the recipe title. It drives entries in most of the other fields, and every ingredient named in a title has to appear in Ingredients.
What to check, field by field
| Field | What to look for |
|---|---|
| The book overall | Missed recipes, blank or duplicate recipes, recipes out of book order. |
| Recipe name | Typos, and missing or wrong accents in foreign words. Over-capitalization. English and foreign titles in the wrong order, or missing the parentheses. Where a title has both, any internal parentheses become square brackets. |
| Recipe Type | Missing, or carried over from the previous recipe. The ones most often missed: Grills & BBQ, Stir-fries, Chili, Curry, Quick / easy, and Cheesecakes. The ones most often misread: Stews & one-pot meals, Baked & steamed desserts, Mousses, trifles, custards & creams, and Pies, tarts & pastries. Also check you've indexed a Recipe Type for significant sub-recipes such as dips, sauces, and dressings when those aren't indexed separately. |
| Ethnicity | Missed clues in the recipe name, including a country or region in a foreign title. North or South African picked from the dropdown instead of North or South American. Too broad or too narrow, such as Asian when the book says Chinese. |
| Course | Main course missing from pasta, meat, fish, and poultry dishes that aren't billed as appetizers. A Course indexed for a sauce, dressing, dough, filling, or stuffing that's never served on its own. |
| Occasion | A season, holiday, or event named in the title and not indexed. Watch for it in other languages too: "primavera" and "printanier" mean Spring, and "Noël" means Christmas. |
| Nutrition | A nutritional feature in the title, such as "Gluten-free pastry" or "Low salt stock", and not indexed. Egg-free on a recipe using liquid egg substitute made from egg whites. Vegan without Vegetarian. Vegetarian on a recipe with meat, fish, or poultry. Vegan on a recipe with dairy, eggs, or honey. |
| Accompaniments | Author suggestions of sides that never got indexed. Pairs that aren't reciprocal. Cross-reference main course to side dish, but not side dish to side dish. Desserts and appetizers aren't Accompaniments to a main course, because they're served before or after it rather than alongside. |
| EYB Comments | Missing where the recipe offers variations or substitutions for a main ingredient, or needs significant preparation time. Missing initial capital or closing period. |
| Ingredients | Anything in the recipe other than salt and water that isn't there. Ingredients named in the title. The wrong pick from the dropdown, which is the error that hides best: Nutella for nutmeg, butterfish for buttermilk, dried cherries for dried chiles, white beets for white beans, garlic pasta for garlic paste, and any near-miss on a cut of meat. A recipe indexed as Egg dishes with no egg, or Rice dishes with no rice. Ingredients from a sub-recipe that's integral to this one, such as the sauce in "Cheese-filled crêpes with mango sauce". |
| New Ingredients | An entry here with no matching entry in Ingredients, or the reverse. |
| Indexer Notes | Leftover reminders you added to find recipes needing Accompaniments. Delete them before you finish. |
Searches that catch what reading misses
On a large or wide-ranging book, use the filter and sort on the Recipes Added list as a last pass.
- Search recipe names for an ingredient that then has to appear in Ingredients: lemon, garlic, onion, wine, egg, butter, and vanilla.
- Search recipe names for Recipe Type clues: "grill", "bbq", "barbe", "skewer", and "brochette" for Grills & BBQ; "chili" for Chili; "curr" for Curry; "stir" for Stir-fries; and "quick", "speedy", "fast", "easy", and "simple" for Quick / easy.
- Search recipe names for Ethnicity clues: "fren" and "proven" for French, "ital" and "tuscan" for Italian.
- Search Indexer Notes for any reminders you no longer need, and clear them.
- Sort on New Ingredients to find every recipe with one, and confirm each also appears in Ingredients.
When the book is clean, submit it the way your program requires. Members click Submit, as described in Indexing as a member. Professional indexers complete the Google Form, as described in Indexing as a professional indexer.