One of my jobs is creation of catalogs, brochures, flyers etc. I have asked repeatedly for a capable person to be assigned to proofread the work. It’s not just the spelling and grammar, but the technical aspect of the construction machinery I am advertising in the pieces. Most of the time, there is no one suitable available, or there is really no time. And so I am the goddess of typos. It sucks.
I take things home, and read them aloud, which amuses the cats. I have made paper templates with only enough room for 1 line, which I use to scroll down the page, so that I am not distracted with design elements or other things. These help somewhat.
One of the main problems is my use of “copy>paste” which I use when I get a format that works in a section; which to my dismay too often means that I have done a copy>paste, and forgotten to rewrite the words I just pasted. And that can happen too frequently when I am interrupted by the phone, or anything else.
So what works for you?
And I apologize for any typos here! I am bleary eyed from proofing!
Proofing my own work is always a dicey proposition for me, too. One trick I learned to help see typos is to read my copy backwards (begin at the end). It removes all context and forces me to see and read every word individually.
I’ve found that it helps to read it in three different ways - on a screen, on paper, and aloud. Reading aloud forces you to read every word, and shows where the flow is bad.
Also try reading a paragraph at a time, with breaks between. By the time you get to the end of anything long you usually have turned off the critical faculties.
A lot of people seem to read backwards, but that doesn’t work for me since you lose proofreading for logic and flow that way.
Reading backwards only catches things that aren’t dependant on context, like egregious spelling errors and a few specific punctuation rules. Generally speaking, proofing your own stuff is going to be fairly difficult because your brain ‘knows what you mean,’ and you’ll tend to gloss over your errors.
Honestly, the best advice is to be more deliberate and careful while actually writing; it’ll save you time in the long run.
If your company wants the material to be published correctly, they should arrange for competent proofreading.
I worked for a little newspaper once. All the advertising was proofed by two people: one reading the finished ad aloud while the other followed the original copy. This was especially important for legal ads from local government offices. A tiny typo in a legal notice could screw up the public hearing process or cause even greater problems.
If you must read it yourself, print it, wait a day, then read the printed version. Everyone I’ve ever heard talk about proofreading has suggested you don’t do it on the computer screen.
Can you find someone in the same boat, and then proofread for each other?
I cannot proofread my own stuff. I once wrote “one two king” where it was meant to be “the one true king” and read over it about a thousand times. Who even knows what that was about… :smack:
But I’m lucky: I lived with people who shared informal proofreading with me, and my SO and I share too. Even if they’re not professionals, they get out the “one two king”-stuff and tell you where you need an extra step in an explanation.
Right. Proofreading my own writing is a real bitch because my brain will often read what I meant instead of what I wrote. I’ve found the best way for me is to step away for a moment. If I proof something immediately after writing it, it’s so fresh in my mind that I’m half reciting the document from memory, which makes it really hard to catch errors. I move on, do something else, let it sit and marinate for a few hours, then return to it with an almost fresh set of eyes. Not as good as having a quality proofreader, no, but it helps.
Total elimination of errors 100% of the time is impossible, any copy editor will tell you that. I’ve seen typos in the New York Times, in The Economist, in books published by major houses, in advertising that has been proofread by no less than nine different people, in Federal Court decisions, you name it. But of course you can do a lot to help yourself.
At my job we don’t proofread something we’ve written. If you’ve written or contributed to a document, it will bounce for proofreading to someone else. This should be the practice anywhere text is produced for distribution or publication, but surprisingly to me, it isn’t.
A printer friend of my father had a framed calendar -the month of January 1963 - in his rec room which I didn’t understand – it was nothing special just a plain old calendar. I asked him about it and he told me to study it. Finally, he pointed out that there were two January 26ths - Saturday at the end of one row and again on Sunday at the start of the next. He explained that between design, typsetting and printing that sheet had been proofed at least 30 times by ten different people and nobody caught it. They printed something like 200,000 before somebody noticed. He said he kept it displayed as a humbling reminder of his worst day ever in the printing business. He added that he still had 199,999 in his garage.
I worked in typography for many years, and we always had a rule: Don’t proofread your own work. If you overlooked something once, you’ll probably overlook it again.
And another rule was: Check your kerning by looking at it upside-down.