FtGKid1 works as an online gig proofreader. Used to work for a couple companies and then went solo.
It’s income. Not a lot but it’ll do.
Unsurprisingly, not a fan of the “quality” of editing for new sites and such.
I hope so, or I have been living with and enabling a psychotic for all these years.
And somehow she’s been paying half the rent. And like Woody Allen said in Annie Hall, whatever the case, I need the eggs.
Unless she sees dead people also, in which case I have nothing to worry about.
On the impetus for the OP, my shock at the collapse of civilization as we knew it was when I saw the first typo in The New Yorker (when they started printing obscenities it was complete).
But more generally, a few notes on the interaction of the two skills, editing and proofreading, in professional settings and lessons learned. I speak generally from having been a staff editor and writer at RCA Records and for decades at engineering magazines, and, as we all do, from being literate and attempting to communicate responsibly.
Before then, I made my bones in the 1970s as a proofreader and factotum at a hot-type shop, and then, in the most soul-devouring proofreading occupation imaginable, as a proofreader during the overnight/lobster shift at a large law firm. (Ever since I heard Moe Green in Godfather use “I made my bones” I try to sneak it in whenever possible.)
At the law firm, proofreading was it; during the breaks I distinctly remember being handed a Chinese take-out menu and being unable to understand at all the plain meaning and the goal, reading only the letters one after another. (True story.)
RCA Records, Classical Music Division, was too small to have its own copy desk (for line editing and structure for sense when he/she finds the editor/writer asleep at the wheel), let alone proofreaders, and even when you have backup, I painfully learned the cardinal rule for all important written material you do, from long works to business letters, resumes, or emails (as said above, usually message boards are too low-value targets):
You cannot edit and proofread at the same time.
If you do, you will screw up one task or the other.
That’s real, old-style proofreading. In fact, one firm I worked for had everyone reading each other’s work back to front, to make sure we weren’t “distracted by what was they meant to say” instead of what was actually on the page.
IME, you also can not proofread your own writing, at least not until a good deal of time has passed.
What is truly becoming less of a thing–based for one thing on the national newspaper my wife writes for–are copy editors. This profession is generally less known/appreciated by people outside writers or editors. As mentioned above, they clean up the sentences, for example repositioning things within a sentence because the main point was buried in the middle, or–more well known, in journalism, and more drastic and influential to the what the editors or writer intendended to give the reader an immediate sense of the main event at the top of the piece, is that they may find that the writer inadvertently “buried the lede” [the spelling of “lead” among the in-crowd].
Naturally, and more argumentitavelu, the editors-above-the-editor/writer may insist upon burying what others say is really the biggest news, in order to influence the public.
These guys also do, in general, the final proofreading.
In some cases, or certain departments of the publication (and certainly with book publishers), the copy-edited copy goes back to the writer or editor to review. Considering the drastic changes in meaning and intent of the writer possible–proofread “corrections” of brand names, places, or—most often in my case, names for technologies or software and changes to mandatory placement of subjects and verbs, and don’t even get me started when they write catchy headlines that go against or are inappropriate to the submitted piece entirely—is the source of the furious cry heard across newsrooms and writers’ desks (in my experience, not at NASA where chain of command shit got real way too fast) to our implacable enemy:
'DON’T FUCK WITH MY COPY!
[the bad thing is that the writers/reporters have to do it themselves more and more, which takes time and they’re not good at it]
I should add that in large book publishing houses, a line editor is a different professional who works with the writer or editor as an intermediary before the material gets to the copy editor, and they will always submit back to the writer their work for adjustments or approval.
Line editors are far more intensively involved with the writer, and are far more involved and knowledgeable of the subject matter, if non-fiction, or the creative process and style of the fiction writer.
Line editors have saved the ass, if not being essentially co-writers, of countless authors, and are as unsung as CIA officers killed in the line of duty.
It was spelled that way because of two important meanings of “lead” whose standard spellings happened to be homographs — so “lede” means the beginning of an article and “ledd” means space between lines.
And “lead” was what the old metal type was made of.