The Proofreading Conundrum
I remember back at university, (which come to think of it, was pretty darn late in my education for this boon of wisdom to be gifted) when a lecturer told me that for any piece of work, once you have done writing it, you should step away, give it a week, then return to proofread it. At first, the sceptic in me thought he was merely attempting to convince the lecture hall that last minute all-nighters were not the way to go; his argument was that you should be completing assignments well before the deadline set, which sounds like something any reasonably organised person would do anyway, but let’s be honest, no one ever does. Procrastination is a student’s best friend, and though over the years I’ve grown to resent that friendship, I’d be lying if I didn’t admit that procrastination was still bumming around in my house, forever getting in the way when I’m trying to get stuff done!
So, there I am, twenty-one-year-old Dan, possibly hungover, undoubtedly sleep-deprived, sat beneath the dreary fluorescent lighting of a mostly empty lecture hall, my eyes starting to glaze over, when the true gem of knowledge is delivered. This advised level of preparedness has nothing to do with being organised or reducing stress, but everything to do with the proofreading itself.
The problem is, if you pull an all-nighter to write that essay you pushed to the very last minute, or like I’m doing right now, you write a blog post with the intent of hitting publish and posting it on the web in only a few minutes time, you are going to have little success in proofreading the work before you submit it. The reason is, when you read your own work, you never read it for how it is written, but instead, you read it as you remember writing it. In our heads, we all think we are better writers than we actually are. Our thoughts move at lightspeed, conjuring fluent ideas and arguments that we would like to think eloquently flow onto the page to create a masterpiece of literature or journalism. But, whilst inside the turbulent brainstorm of our minds, sentences are articulately strung together, when they eventually make it onto the page, they can often turn out somewhat lacklustre.
Therein lies the issue. You finally complete that last sentence. The job is done. All that is left is a little tweaking—a few typos here—maybe edit a sentence there, and hey presto! Pulitzer/Booker prize, here I come! Only, no. You hit send, waiting for the praise to come rolling in. But when your feedback arrives, it is something of a disappointment. Not quite sure the criticism is justified, you return to your work, convinced you have been unfairly assessed, only to find, the more you read, the less you seem to recognise the work as your own. It is clumsy, blundering from point to point, ineloquently mushing together muddled metaphors and awkward sentence structure. Everywhere you look, there are spelling mistakes and typos, yet when you went through it before, you were convinced that you’d caught them all! Why did you think so highly of this only a week ago, but are almost embarrassed by it now?
The answer: when you first read it, you were doing so as the writer, whereas now, a week later, having forgotten the majority of what you wrote, you are absorbing it as a reader, unbiased by the writing process.
So, there you have it. Wait a week before you proofread, and you’ll only ever produce masterworks of writing.
Except… it’s still more complicated than that.
Another piece of advice I’ve heard over the years, though this came admittedly too late for university, was that you should get a classmate to go through your essays before you submit them. The reason why: even after a week, chances are, you’ll still have a rough memory of the work. It’s infinitely harder to pick up mistakes in your own work than it is to do so in someone else’s! You can read and reread your work innumerable times, but mistakes will always slip through the cracks. This is the reason why newspapers and book publishers have editors. Journalists and authors more often than not can write pretty damn well! They know how to spell. They know how to use punctuation. They are often gramma Nazis! And yet, they can’t be trusted to edit their own work, for the simple reason that they are blind to their own mistakes.
Now, I’ve just self-published my second book, and I’m due to start the process for my third in the next week or so. I could hire a professional proofreader/editor to go through my work with a fine-toothed comb, but that is a really expensive service! So seemingly, I have a choice: suck it up, pay the price, get it professionally done, and upload a well-polished manuscript ready for publishing, or, skimp on the costs, do it myself, and upload an error-ridden version of my vision.
Well, I opted for option two. Only—I have a secret weapon in my fight against typos, and his name is George! Now, George isn’t a real person, nor is he some online editing service. George is built right into Microsoft Word! My secret is that, whenever I am proofreading, I get Word to narrate my work back to me at the same time. The narrator has a few voices for each language option, and George sounds to me the least robotic of the British English options (sorry Susan and Hazel!)
George reads aloud, whilst my eyes skim the text. Sounds silly, but the truth is that I must pick up about four times as many mistakes. Hearing George read something written wrongly picks out countless errors that my eyes would have otherwise skipped over. A missing ‘s’ at the end of a word, a random pause from a wayward comma—even use of the wrong character name!
Now, this method isn’t perfect. My books no doubt still contain plenty of mistakes both myself and George failed to pick up on, but the state of affairs are much better than they would be otherwise. Two heads are better than one. Even if one of those heads is a disembodied robot living inside the settings of a word processing program!