The Clam Before the Storm
Carol Lindsay
In today’s atmosphere of cost-cutting and “streamlining” writers are
finding themselves working without the safety net of an editor or
proofreader. This means that we’re relying on our own knowledge of spelling
and grammar in publishing our work. Spellcheckers and grammar computer
programs are intended to enhance these skills, but trusting them to correct
your work is a mistake. With the lack of editors and proofreaders, this is
allowing serious errors in the final product.
Proofreading is very important. When you meet your
publisher/boss and they hand you a page of your work with one of the
following errors, it is embarrassing at best, career-limiting at worst.
Spellchecker Works, But Not Hear
When you misspell a word but the mistake is itself a correct word, a
spellchecker is not going to catch it for you. Several novels published in
the last couple of years have this kind of mistake.
“I don’t know where it is. Look over their.”
This is from a book by a new author and a new publishing company. The
book was liberally peppered with errors like this. Because I know the writer, I know that the manuscript was reviewed by at
least three people.
If you are asked to be a reviewer for another person’s
work, please take this responsibility seriously. If you don’t watch for
errors like this, you are not helping your friend.
If you are reviewing your own work, take time to distance yourself from
it so you can catch problems like this. Those of us with habitual typos know
from bitter experience.
I regularly type management as “mangement” and
manage as “mange”. Spellchecker will catch the first, but not the second.
These typos have been published and come back to bite me – usually just
around the time for my boss to consider renewing (or NOT renewing) my
contract.
Setting your spellchecker to automatically correct errors for you can
cause other problems.
“What happened here, John Coffee?” McGee asked in his low, earnest
voice. “You want to tell me that?”
This is from Stephen King’s The Green Mile and the character’s
name is John Coffey. Did a spellchecker automatically change this? This book
was a reprint which means the publisher’s system may be set to automatically
change words the programming considers incorrect. That’s scary.
Review your spellchecker settings to ensure this doesn’t happen to you.
Missing Text
In the rewrite process words get deleted, spaces drift, and sentences
merge. An extra eye on the copy would have corrected this.
As nightmares go, I’m sure you’ve had worse. The problem is that a
few of my dreams have come have died.
This was from page 1 of Odd Hours by Dean Koontz. Obviously it is
a rewrite error, but no one looked the final copy over before going to
print. A grammar program is not going to flag this for you.
With publishers looking to cut costs, proofreading and editing suffers.
If you want your writing to be taken seriously, you will have to be vigilant
about your work.
When Find/Replace Leaves You Lost
The find/replace feature on many word processor programs is a very
literal tool. It does exactly what you tell it to do.
The enterprises of iron and steel in the world figureht for the
lower cost and steady supply on resources becoming more and more
intense.
This sentence is in a journal from the 20th World Mining Congress. This is not the only sentence from the journal containing the word
"figureht", which tells me that someone publishing the journal decided that
the captions under the pictures should read “figure 1” rather than “fig 1”.
This person asked the find/replace feature to find all occurrences of “fig”
and change them to “figure”. Thus fight became figureht and figure became
figureure.
This exact situation is so common that you can Google the misspelled
words and find thousands of hits.
Find/replace is an extremely useful and fickle tool. Be careful how you
use it and ALWAYS proofread when you are done.
Proofing the Final Manuscript
In his book On Writing Stephen King advises that you wait at least
six weeks before you begin reviewing your first draft. Actually he
recommends that you take a couple of days off and then get started on
another project. This helps to clear your mind and “recycle” your
imagination. Wait at least six weeks before you pick up your first draft and
begin to review it.
I would say the same thing about reading your final
draft.
As a technical writer I don’t have a six week margin but I do need time
to get away from a project before I can edit myself effectively. When
setting deadlines I always give myself a week of rest time. During that week
I work on other assignments and stay away from the project. When I come back
my mind is clearer and I am less prone to get bored and let my eyes glide
over the page or skip paragraphs.
This year I am scheduled to rewrite at least five mind-numbingly boring
software reference guides. (I wrote them in the first place, so I can state
this without fear of offending the writer.) This will be somewhere in the
region of 2,000 pages – each of which could be used as a reason for not
renewing my contract. With this bitter truth in mind, I will be carefully
proofreading my work page by page. This can’t be done in a hurry, and I will
budget the necessary time to do it right.
In the end we can only do our best. Do not rely on a computer, or a best
friend, or even a publisher to make sure your work is in its best form.
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