Proofreading: Why You Should Do a Good Job Yourself

Today I spent most of my morning taking a proofreading test so that I'll (hopefully) be qualified to proofread for the company I'm working at. First of all, I think it's worth noting that proofreading is written more or less in Greek---or at least that's what it looks like. Learning the marks is a bit like learning a foreign language, or a secret code. I've had some experience with it before, and had been studying for a couple of days, but I still had to stop frequently while taking said test and look things up in the Chicago Manual of Style they were so kind as to give me for reference.

But the reason I'm blogging about proofreading is because of one sentence I ran into on the test. It was a piece of dialogue, and ran something like:

"Slender yes. but with curves in the all right places."

Zomg! Grammatical error that's easy to spot!

But how to fix it? The most obvious fixes are to either replace the period with a comma or capitalize the 'b' in but. Unfortunately, that's a fairly major stylistic decision. "Slender yes, but with curves in all the right places." reads quite differently than "Slender, yes. But with curves in all the right places." One is just a statement of fact, but the other implies a wink and a grin--at least to me anyway. And it's difficult to tell whether the author hit the wrong key when going for a comma or forgot to capitalize a 'b'.

While I'm sure it gets easier with time and practice to make those guesses right, I think it definitely behooves the author to just make sure they get it right the first time...and it saves the proofreaders work, which is always a good thing. :-)