Font geeks love to debate readability and myriad other details about fonts. The other thing that matters when editing is being able to tell when the wrong character has been used. Font choice can cleverly conceal a wrong character hiding in a document: a 1 looks like an l, a superscript o looks like a °, an ‘ masquerades as a ′…
Changing the font to one that shows a more drastic difference between characters is one solution. Some editors prefer to edit in Helvetica, Calibri, or Verdana for just such a reason. If you modify the font of the “Normal” Style, it’s easy to undo this font change before finalizing the file. The client will never know the trick that helped you spot those apostrophes that should be primes. Just turn off Track Changes when you change the font.
Verdana shows clear differences between the one and ell but if you didn’t know what a degree symbol (right) looked like, it might be easy for the superscript letter O to pass itself off. 
Calibri makes differences very clear, once you know what a degree symbol should look like. 
Helvetica is an editor favourite, and it’s easy to see why in this example.
Never miss a Word-Wrangling Wednesday tip. Sign up here to get them by email.
By practicing one tip each week, you can invest 13 hours this year into professional development. To search the blog, use the orange bar right above this.
