Proofreading Tricks

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Cindy. How are you?

Hi, Cindy. Doing well. Where are you calling us from?

Bethesda, Maryland.

Bethesda.

Well, welcome to the show, Cindy. How can we help?

All through my working career, I’ve had issues with proofreading.

And I had been thinking about some mistakes that I had missed the week prior with some materials that we have to provide to our board of trustees.

And it’s a muscle that I just have never had training in exercising.

And I really am kind of desperately asking, how can you train yourself to be a better proofreader for both content and grammar?

I didn’t learn in school how to proofread.

It just was assumed that you could proofread, and my boss says that you either have it or you don’t.

Oh, really?

That’s what she says, which I find discouraging.

Oh, dear.

I want to prove her wrong.

Cindy, how are you going about proofreading now?

Well, of course, I look on the screen, and then whenever I do my content on the screen, I look at it, and then I print it out.

Oh, that’s good.

Do you read it aloud?

I don’t read it aloud. I’m in a cube farm with all of my colleagues, so I have never done that.

If I did do that, I would need to go to another room so I didn’t disrupt all of my other colleagues.

I could try, definitely.

There’s a couple things here, too. It sounds like you’re doing more than proofreading.

I just want to be clear here. It sounds like you’re actually doing copy editing as well as rewriting as well as proofreading.

So these are three different kinds of skills.

So I would not feel bad that you don’t naturally have this skill.

This is a learned skill.

Anybody who can be educated at a university level can totally learn to do proofreading, copy editing, and rewriting.

Anybody can learn to do it.

I agree. It’s a skill.

Some of us will be better than others, but we can all learn to do it.

That said, I would go to your boss and say, look, there are some copy editing certificate programs online.

And, for example, the University of California, San Diego has one.

Actually, my wife teaches there is how I know about it.

But there are others as well that you can find at copyediting.com where they’ll list these courses.

They do cost some money.

I would go to your boss and say, look, we both recognize that I need some help here.

Will you fund my certificate so that I can actually become a professional copy editor and go through a program with people who do this for a living and who can step by step teach me the procedures that I need to know?

Because it sounds a little bit like you’ve got some of the picture, but you need all the pieces coming together so that you have all the different methods.

So reading aloud is one.

Actually, line reading, where you take a ruler or a blank sheet of paper and you move it down the page line by line and check every line as it is revealed.

There’s also other standard tricks like changing the type size so it’s really big, like 18 point and making it a serif font if it was originally a sans serif or vice versa.

But there are a lot of different things here that you can be taught.

But the biggest thing is practice and time.

Do you have big blocks of time?

Are they giving you enough time to do this?

No.

And I think that that’s where a lot of the issue happens.

It seems like whenever some of the mistakes happen, it’s usually on a rush, you know, the 11th hour kind of thing, which I know is typical.

And I think that she realizes that that is going to happen as well.

There isn’t always a lot of time between turnaround.

I have recently been doing things and turning the paper upside down, and then I’ll wait, you know, like half an hour or sometimes a little bit longer and then turn it back over and then I’ll go through it again so it’s not fresh in my mind.

That is a great piece of advice that a lot of people recommend.

The most amount of time that you can leave that document aside, do it, even if it’s a day or a week, because you really do need those fresh eyes, and that is so important.

And, Cindy, I think you’re going to have to get a pay raise, too, for spending all this extra time.

Can you suggest that to your boss?

I know these are all things that require the consent of your supervisors and the company as a whole, but copy editing is not something to be treated lightly.

It’s not a passing thing that you just do at the last minute or at the end of the day or whenever you have an opportunity.

It’s like it has to be built into the structure of deadlines, and maybe that’s part of the problem.

Right.

I really appreciate your advice.

So you said to look for copyediting courses online.

Yeah.

Copyediting.com has a nice journal, but they also have a list of courses, some which they provide and some which they just simply have mentions of, and I’ll link back to them.

I know there’s a really good course that is highly recommended by my copyediting colleagues at the University of California, San Diego, and there are others.

Just make sure that it’s a reputable program.

Make sure that you are able to get testimonials and talk to people because they can be expensive.

And some of them are multilevel courses that involve three or four kind of series of work.

All right.

Thank you so much.

I really appreciate you taking my call.

Sure, Cindy.

Good luck.

And let us know how it turns out.

Will you, Cindy?

Let us know how it goes.

I will indeed.

Thank you.

Take care now.

Bye-bye.

Okay.

Bye-bye.

Bye.

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