I must have proofread it at least two dozen times. At least.

[MillieDynamite]

Yes, that happens to be all the time.

Yet on reading what went up this morning, two typos jumped out and smacked me in the face.

Dammit. Dammit dammit dammit.

 

[StillStunned]

Yes, that happens to be all the time.

Be too.

 

[gunhilltrain]

Actually, this isn't true any more. Or at least not complete. I quote from the College of Media and Publishing:

Strictly speaking, both you and Keith are making good points, but much of that is too complicated and time-consuming for a typical Lit author. It's fine if you are in professional publishing, but it's too much for an online. somewhat informal site like Lit. Thus we do "blind" proofreading (I call it "cold" proofreading). Proofreading, copy editing, and content changes are made in the same pass. We can't afford to have three different people handling all of that. It should work well-enough in our way.

 

[StillStunned]

Strictly speaking, both you and Keith are making good points, but much of that is too complicated and time-consuming for a typical Lit author. It's fine if you are in professional publishing, but it's too much for an online. somewhat informal site like Lit. Thus we do "blind" proofreading (I call it "cold" proofreading). Proofreading, copy editing, and content changes are made in the same pass. We can't afford to have three different people handling all of that. It should work well-enough in our way.

Speaking as a professional editor, that's actually how it goes with pretty much everything now. A lot of what I do is online articles, but I also edit court documents, annual reports, contracts, policy papers, PhD theses and even on occasion a book or two.

My job involves checking for spelling, grammar and punctuation, querying inconsistencies and factual errors and improving overall readability - and that can involve taking whole paragraphs apart and rewriting them. Unfortunately most of the people writing the texts I edit have little clue about how to write effectively.* Fortunately they apparently have enough sense to pay me to fix it.

* Also, different languages have different ways of structuring sentences and paragraphs that don't always work in English.

 

[lustychimera]

I proofread the hell outa my stuff, but it never fails that the voice to text readers highlight something when I run it through. Highly recommend.

Also, sometimes reading it in a different format helps. Copy/Paste into another program or even print off a hard copy.

 

[samhasstories]

I see errors all the time in works by major publishers, who presumably have professional editors on the case. It's a bummer, but it's human. But yeah, I get the frustration. I assume I have many of those.

 

[ShelbyDawn57]

Be too.

I no what you meme.

 

[AndersonsBiographer]

It's called "Falling Hare" and it's notable how many period details got into it. (Wendell Wilkie, ration stickers, etc.) Near the end, it somehow foreshadows how a B-25 bomber hit the Empire State building two years later.

6:18, 4F printed on his beating heart

I always wondered what that meant as a kid.

(Army code for drastically limiting medical condition, hospitalization required, and/or ineligible to be inducted via the draft.)

Somehow, I did know what an A Card was. Possibly from hearing older family talk about it.

 

[KeithD]

Actually, this isn't true any more. Or at least not complete. I quote from the College of Media and Publishing:

OK, thanks. That isn't something the author does him/herself in either case, though. It's bringing an outside checker. What an author does for her/himself is review and revision.

 

[Bramblethorn]

Actually, this isn't true any more. Or at least not complete. I quote from the College of Media and Publishing:

I suspect digital publishing is the reason for the shift here. If an author is sending in a typed or handwritten manuscript and that's being manually typeset (or even OCRed) there's plenty of scope for errors to creep in during in that transcription stage so it makes sense to have a checking process focussed on those "you left out a 'not'" kinds of errors.

But if there's no manual copying/transcription stage, there's less value in having that step. Not that things can't go wrong with document conversions and layout, it happens all the time, but comparing to the original text is a less useful way of catching the kinds of issues that arise there.

In the technical editing work I do, those "proofreading" and "copy editing" distinctions are often blurred. More and more I'm getting gigs that combine the two roles, because it's hard to accurately proofread the kind of material we publish without being familiar with the subject matter.

 

[VallesMarineris]

Here's a proofreading technique I use that I haven't seen anyone else mention: change the way the text looks.

For example, I like to write in dark mode in Scrivener and of course I proof the text as thoroughly as I can while I'm editing. When it's time to send it off, I export to MS Word. In Word, black text on white, I select the whole story and change the font (lately I've been using American Typewriter). That makes the text different enough that I see things I hadn't before. Also, Word's grammar checker, while 90% useless for grammar, does catch things like "she she" and there/their, so it helps. Sometimes I'll do the same thing in Pages, whose grammar checker is less annoying and can catch typos that neither I nor Word caught.

Worth a try.

 

[pink_silk_glove]

In the age of typewriters, I was rushing to finish a term paper when I left a there/their mistake in. The professor wrote on it, "This is a sinister grammatical error." Only an English professor would call it that.

I had a teacher once warn us that he would indeed read every word of our assignments. He explained that he was writing a term paper in university, staying up all night typing away and right in the middle of a word he just typed out 'are you even reading this'. When he got the paper back there was no marking on that paragraph at all. The prof had indeed not even read it (or at the very most had lazily skim-read it), so he vowed to always read every word of students' assignments. Imagine grading something that you haven't read?

 

[pink_silk_glove]

Most if not all of my published errors are in my final final edits. As much as I harp on myself to proof all of my edits, that's where they seem to happen. I decide to reword something or flip a sentence around in the eleventh hour, invariably make a typo and I don't catch it.

The worst error ever, I used the phrase 'go upstairs' twice in the same sentence. I published it and a couple of days later read through the published submission. When I saw it I was thoroughly appalled. Figuring out how it somehow got through I realized that it was one of the last things that I had edited, deciding to flip the sentence around to vary the structures and improve the flow. I moved the phrase 'go upstairs' from late in the sentence to early in the sentence (or vice-versa) and neglected to delete the original usage. If it would have been one of my earlier edits I'm sure that I would have caught it. As it is, I'm a hack. Seriously. Unforgivable of me. Cringe does not come near to how I feel about it.

 

[gunhilltrain]

Here's a proofreading technique I use that I haven't seen anyone else mention: change the way the text looks.

For example, I like to write in dark mode in Scrivener and of course I proof the text as thoroughly as I can while I'm editing. When it's time to send it off, I export to MS Word. In Word, black text on white, I select the whole story and change the font (lately I've been using American Typewriter). That makes the text different enough that I see things I hadn't before. Also, Word's grammar checker, while 90% useless for grammar, does catch things like "she she" and there/their, so it helps. Sometimes I'll do the same thing in Pages, whose grammar checker is less annoying and can catch typos that neither I nor Word caught.

Worth a try.

Somebody else on AH gave me that technique a while ago. It seems to help. I change the font and color (usually dark red, purple, or blue). I only use Word, which I don't think has a dark mode. At the end, I change it back to the Word default style.

 

[gunhilltrain]

I had a teacher once warn us that he would indeed read every word of our assignments. He explained that he was writing a term paper in university, staying up all night typing away and right in the middle of a word he just typed out 'are you even reading this'. When he got the paper back there was no marking on that paragraph at all. The prof had indeed not even read it (or at the very most had lazily skim-read it), so he vowed to always read every word of students' assignments. Imagine grading something that you haven't read?

To be fair, I could have started writing a week or even more earlier. But I was 19, 20 . . .

 

[MillieDynamite]

To err is human. To edit is BORING!

 

[StillStunned]

To err is human. To edit is BORING!

Hey!

Nah, you're right. At least people pay me for it. Only 20 more years to retirement.

 

[pink_silk_glove]

To err is human. To edit is BORING!

I understand where you're coming from and appreciate the humor, but more accurately, editing can certainly be tedious (especially when you're all drafted up and are excited to publish soon) but it's very satisfying when you fix or improve something important.

 

[RetroFan]

I still laugh at the typo I made in 'My Best Friend's Crazy Fat Sister' where the narrator reflects that it was 'worth the weight' rather than 'worth the wait' after he and his friend's overweight sister (whom he had lusted over for years) have sex for the first time.

 

[ElectricBlue]

Here's a proofreading technique I use that I haven't seen anyone else mention: change the way the text looks.

For example, I like to write in dark mode in Scrivener and of course I proof the text as thoroughly as I can while I'm editing. When it's time to send it off, I export to MS Word. In Word, black text on white, I select the whole story and change the font (lately I've been using American Typewriter). That makes the text different enough that I see things I hadn't before. Also, Word's grammar checker, while 90% useless for grammar, does catch things like "she she" and there/their, so it helps. Sometimes I'll do the same thing in Pages, whose grammar checker is less annoying and can catch typos that neither I nor Word caught.

Worth a try.

Yes, change font, size and colour regularly over the course of a story. I do a rolling self edit and end up with very clean copy. I reckon making the text look different makes the eye see what's there, rather than what the mind thinks is there. That and the Word spell check are the only tools I use.

 

[gunhilltrain]

Somebody just asked for a story excerpt, and I found a typo from last March. What may have happened is that I added more text after running it through Grammarly. Maybe I should use that program very close to submitting the story, but I've been doing that earlier in the process. Or maybe I should run it through twice! It was the kind of thing, a verb tense, that Grammarly usually does pretty well (it can be very quirky and requires judgment calls at times).

 

[gunhilltrain]

6:18, 4F printed on his beating heart

I always wondered what that meant as a kid.

(Army code for drastically limiting medical condition, hospitalization required, and/or ineligible to be inducted via the draft.)

Somehow, I did know what an A Card was. Possibly from hearing older family talk about it.

They had a whole lot of codes beyond 4F. There is a list online about what they all meant. It also shows how lucky the United States was in WWII. In Germany, near the end, if you could walk they put you in the Volksstrum (the Home Guard). These guys look really motivated to face the entire Red Army.

https://warfarehistorynetwork.com/wp-content/uploads/Q-Volks-0.jpg

 

[AndersonsBiographer]

They had a whole lot of codes beyond 4F. There is a list online about what they all meant. It also shows how lucky the United States was in WWII. In Germany, near the end, if you could walk they put you in the Volksstrum (the Home Guard). These guys look really motivated to face the entire Red Army.

https://warfarehistorynetwork.com/wp-content/uploads/Q-Volks-0.jpg

If you could walk... at all.

I once dated a girl who's grandfather served in the Red Army. She said that, during the Battle of Berlin, he captured a number of Volksstrum who had wooden legs.

Like, multiple amputated combatants in a single unit, from how I understood it.

According to some of my own family's accounts, the Confederacy was about as desperate by the end of Petersburg.

 

[gunhilltrain]

To err is human. To edit is BORING!

The weird thing is that I sort of, like it? Not sure of the exact term I should use. It's the phase where you can see, most of the time, that the story was worth doing in the first place. For most of the stories I never finished, I abandoned them part of the way through the writing. There are a few cases where a story wasn't working, and I was able to send it in another direction and salvage it. Usually that required seeing some aspect of the main character (or characters) that I had missed before.

 

[gunhilltrain]

Yes, change font, size and colour regularly over the course for a story. I do a rolling self edit and end up with very clean copy. I reckon making the text look different makes the eye see what's there, rather than what the mind thinks is there. That and the Word spell check are the only tools I use.

I'm sure I picked up that idea from one of your posts a while back. So far I usually do it once and then change back to the default appearance after reading it.