By Margaret Speer In my January 15th 2014 blog post, I mentioned that a goal of mine since relatively early in my time as a Project Assistant to the William Blake Archive (sounds so fancy, doesn’t it?) has been to improve upon the Letters Proofing Form. Side by side with this idea was to maybe even create a generalized proofing form that could be useful for all projects, something to be the Queen Mother Proofing Form. This comment caught the attention of the lovely Laura, and thus the monster was born. 
The two of us got to work on combining the proofreading form that Lisa and Hardeep created (and made PERFECT, as they said when they handed it over to us) when they were working on the Tiriel manuscript, with the Letters Proofing Form, or the LPF, as I like to call it, now that we are on such intimate terms. There are a lot of great elements on the LPF that could be useful for proofing other works, and the Tiriel proofing form articulates some checks much more clearly that the LPF, so there’s plenty to mine in both directions for the composition of a generalized form. We may add more parts and bits from documents that have been used for proofreading different works over time to this Frankenstein’s monster of a proofing form. My intended audience for this project is future Project Assistants who start their work with the Archive proofing letters, as Megan and I did, and as the generation of new grad students who joined this year did. I hope it will be really useful in its explicitness of instruction for proofreaders not yet familiar with the structure of the Archive itself and our ethos of transcription/ notation, as this was what I most wanted when I was a fresh faced Project Assistant.
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