Black Hippy Chick Day: Proofing Your Work

I have a friend who’s a maddeningly exceptional proofreader. She’s actually in IT, and yet she’s a better proofreader than I am. Even worse, she knows more than I do. This is an obvious injustice, but the world isn’t fair. Every morning, she gives me a list of syntax errors and typos from my daily post (with permission of course). She’s taught me a great deal.

I usually proofread my posts approximately five million times after I post them. It’s never enough, though. She almost always finds a few problems I didn’t notice.

Trying to find your own mistakes is a lot like trying to find a specific beetle named Harry in the Amazon. You’re surrounded by weeds, ants, piranhas, and beetles that look exactly like Harry. Everything’s covered in dew, and every time you try to focus on beetles, hey look, there’s a walking piranha chasing a rat!

It’s usually better to simply put the writing aside until you forget what it says. That way, you can look at it with fresh eyes later, and the typos will pop out like walking piranhas.

The more I learn from my proofreader, the better I get at spotting errors. She’s always drawing my attention to rules I haven’t thought of in years. We have daily discussions on whether semi-colons are better than commas, and this is excellent practice.

I’ve been writing for 29 years. I still don’t know everything. I still can’t cite the AP Style Manual by heart. I still don’t think much about clauses, and I still need a proofreader. This is why every newspaper hires its own stable of them—because everyone makes mistakes, even seasoned journalists. I’m not a seasoned journalist, so I make even more. I don't get to keep a free proofreader in my pocket, but I can certainly do the legwork required to proof my work 50 million times, and so can you.

If you’re not a seasoned journalist either, and you’re not researching your choices or proofing your work days after it was written, you’re not giving your craft the respect it’s due.

While we don't deal much with grammatical errors in this workshop, you do need to gain control of yours if you want to write professionally. If your first sentens is litered wit mistooks, no editor is ever going to read the second, so you will never be published. Now is the time to get this in hand. Get a Chicago Manual and use it.