Canada Post Collection Canada copyediting and proofreading

Collection Canada is a stunning hardcover book that brings together all the collectible stamps issued by Canada Post each year. For more than a decade, Ascribe provided expert copyediting and proofreading services to help tell the story of those stamps — and in turn, the story of Canada itself — in a consistent, reader-friendly way.

How Ascribe helped

Every year, Canada Post issues dozens of special collector stamps that celebrate Canada and its people: historic moments and milestones, national parks and monuments, famous artists and musicians, holidays and festivals, sports teams, animals, and much more. These commemorative stamps are gathered in Collection Canada, a highly collectible coffee table book that also features engaging articles, illustrations and photographs that add historical and cultural context to the stamps.

From 2012 to 2022, Ascribe was called upon annually to assist with the project, lending our writing, copyediting and proofreading expertise to ensure the story of each stamp was beautifully told. For the approximately 20 articles included in every edition of Collection Canada — ranging from a few paragraphs to a few hundred words each — our team first performed a thorough line-by-line copyedit of the client-provided drafts, ensuring consistency in spelling, capitalization and punctuation in accordance with Canada Post’s in-house style guide. We edited the content to reduce repetitive or awkward phrases, and also looked to make sure the tone of voice was consistent across the entire set of articles. To be suitable for a general audience, each article had to use plain language and be friendly, warm and engaging.

Months later, after the entire book had been designed and put into layout, we were brought in to do a proofread to ensure the final publication was clean and error-free, in terms of both content and formatting. In the early years of this engagement, we would send an editor to Canada Post’s headquarters in Ottawa, proofreading with pen and paper print-outs of every page from front to back cover. Later, we reviewed PDFs of the design files, inserting comments as needed to indicate any changes to be made.

Deliverable: Copyedited hardcover publication

Our process:

• Copyediting in Microsoft Word
• Proofreading of layout PDFs or printed pages