Proofreading

Proofreading tips

In last week's post I noted that spellchecking software is a good start, but is by no means infallible. You'll need to check your text as thoroughly as possible for all the things that the spellchecker will miss.
Tip 1. Leave your writing and come back to it. If you just typed a paragraph, you'll think it is right because you just typed what was in your head, didn't you? So if you read it then, you'll probably miss some mistakes.
Tip 2. Read your text out loud. This helps to pick up things like long sentences, and subject-verb disagreement. It will also help with things that literally don't 'sound right'. I read one of my chapters and picked up the fact that no film should ever be described as an 'epic biopic' - not even Lawrence of Arabia.
Tip 3. Proofread on paper. when I print a copy for proofreading, I make some simple changes of format to aid readability. For example, I like to change to a serif font such as Times New Roman or Garamond, and also change the line spacing. This can help pick up the use of the same word in adjacent sentences.
Tip 4. Proofread one line at a time. Sometimes I've been proofreading and thinking 'gosh this paragraph is great', and get really into it. But when I do there's a tendency to skip a word or two. By using a ruler, or even a piece of paper, I can concentrate on one line at a time. This can feel like learning to read again, following each word with your finger, but that's a good idea too!
Tip 5. Take your time. A luxury we don't always have, but your success rate for catching errors will fall if you rush things.
Tip 6. Read a sentence at a time, out of sequence. There's a psychological idea at work here - if you read sentences in sequence, your brain knows what is coming next, and will 'error-correct' for you - so you might miss something. By reading sentences out of sequence, you avoid this trap. Naturally, if you try to read sentences completely at random, it can be difficult to keep track of which sentences you have checked. I mark the end of each sentence with a tick to show I've read it.
Tip 7. Do it again. One pass won't be enough for all but the shortest of pieces. You should proofread several times, concentrating on different aspects of your work, such as spelling, punctuation, subject-verb agreement, and so on. It's also worth noting another reason for proofreading several times - your work may be publication-ready, but you may find yourself adding things. Since my book is about achievements of people at particular ages, if there's a news story about a 70-year-old mother, or a 97-year-old skydiver, I want to change my book to include them. And new text, or even amended text, requires proofing again.

Getting your book right

Once I made the decision to publish The Octogenarian Ski-jumper myself, I took on all those tasks that a publisher would normally do. I'm going to leave aside any discussions about what publishers actually do and don't do with respect to books, since I'm not experienced in that area. But the key point is that most self-publishing routes require you, as the author, to do a lot more work. Now as a writer you have been doing the writing, and it is fair to assume that you are close to happy with the content of your book. But there's a lot more things to do before the book can be considered publishable.
I've touched on a couple of these items in earlier posts. In one I described the frontmatter - all those things that a printed book contains that aren't the actual contents - things like a title page, the copyright page, a table of contents, and lists of illustrations if you have them. In another I described how to use the features of Microsoft Word 2007, specifically Microsoft Word 2007 sections, to get a professional appearance for pages by using headers and footers.
But the most important thing is to get the content right. Are you the sort of person who gets annoyed by misprints, poor formatting, or inconsistencies in what you read? Even if you aren't, many of your readers will be. And an unsatisfied read is a LOT less likely to pass on a recommendation about your book to a friend.
The first thing you should do is to spellcheck your book. But I stress, this is only the first thing you should do. Spellchecking software will find some errors, but will also report 'false positives' where it indicates that a word isn't in its dictionary. If your book is a novel that deals with the modern day, you won't have too many of these: but if you write science fiction, say, or technical terms, or have a lot of foreign words, your spellchecker will highlight a lot of words as wrong when they aren't. You can usually add words to your spellchecker's dictionary, which goes some way towards solving a problem.
More serious than that are the things the spellchecker misses. Consider the two phrases:

• There is a French window in every bedroom, affording delightful prospects
• There is a French widow in every bedroom, affording delightful prospects

A spellchecker won't save you from embarrassment here. (Incidentally, that delightful second line with its second meaning arising from one missing letter comes from the late and great Gerard Hoffnung, in a sketch he wrote about mistranslations.)
In a future post I'll be addressing how to overcome some of the problems that the spellchecker can't handle.