Guest post: Proofreading tips and techniques by Brian Karrey

Tonight’s guest blog post, on the topic of the editing process, is brought to you by proofreader Brian Karrey.

Proofreading tips and techniques

After an essay or other written work has been done and completed, checking to ensure it’s in the best condition follows. Proofreading work saves a lot of time and ensures that your work doesn’t go in vain. Proofing software is not efficient. This leaves your open option as the manual way. Here are some tips for you:

1.     Concentration

You need to concentrate on your work if you intend to catch the small mistakes. And to do this, you need to rid yourself of all distractions in the room where you are working. This will promote your ability to see the small errors.

2.     Put it on paper

Sometimes it’s hard to proof soft copy.  This is because of how the eyes are naturally made not to tell the accuracy of typed work. Hard copy proofing is the best approach. Print the work out and proof it.

3.     Homonyms

These are words that share same spellings and pronunciation, yet have different meanings. For most people, words like complement and compliment are distractive. They could spell disaster in an essay or exam test.

4.     Contractions and the apostrophes

Contractions are difficult. Yet, many people make mistakes that include them in their writing. Words like their and they’re can hurt the credibility of your writing if they are not checked. Also check out for instances where you have used apostrophes in plurals. They are never used there and you need to correct that.

5.     Checking for punctuations

A huge part of proofreading work is to check punctuations. This means looking out for words that are capitalized wrongly, missing or extra commas, periods that have been used wrongly and other typos.

6.     Read work backwards

It’s essential for you to start the habit of reading words backwards. This is because, the brains makes and corrects its own mistakes. Whereas this could be amazing in the ideal world, the corrections are wrong. You need to read each word, back to back to determine which one doesn’t make sense.

7.     Check the numbers

Numbers are often confusing in text. However, humans are mad about numbers and you never know what their implications are when they turn out wrong. The best you can do is double-check your number sources. Make sure the numbers you use in the essay or writing is accurate.

8.     Get someone else do the proofing

This is quite straightforward. Professional editors are in the best position to see ambiguity and mistakes in work. Get some help with the proofing before hitting send or submitting.

I made the compliment / complement error when I started out posting the author spotlights until one of my contributors pointed it out to me… fortunately I hadn’t done many. Thank you, Brian!

Brian Karrey is a paper proofreader at Papersconsulting.com.

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If you would like to write a writing-related guest post for my blog then feel free to email me with an outline of what you would like to write about. If it’s writing-related then it’s highly likely I’d email back and say “yes please”.

The blog interviews return as normal tomorrow morning with non-fiction author Liz Thompson – the five hundred and seventy-fourth of my blog interviews with novelists, poets, short story authors, bloggers, autobiographers and more. A list of interviewees (blogged and scheduled) can be found here. If you like what you read, please do go and investigate further. And I enjoy hearing from readers of my blog; do either leave a comment on the relevant interview (the interviewees love to hear from you too!) and / or email me.

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Guest post: Editing from an editor’s viewpoint by Alana Woods

Tonight’s guest blog post, on the topic of editing is brought to you by thriller novelist, short story and non-fiction author, spotlightee and interviewee Alana Woods.

Editing from an editor’s viewpoint

I’ve been a professional editor for over 30 years. For most of that time I worked in various Australian public service departments, latterly as Director of Publishing at the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission.

I’m no longer in full-time employment—haven’t been for about six years. Most of my time now is taken up with my own writing but I continue to contract edit, again for government departments because that’s where my clientele is. But I also occasionally edit manuscripts for authors.

I imagine what editors actually do may be a bit of a mystery to some.  I know you’re familiar with the general idea: picking up errors and making or suggesting changes to improve a document, but do you know the nitty gritty?  For those who don’t here’s a rundown.

There are three levels of editing.

1. Substantive edit. A substantive edit is the full box and dice. You scrutinise and fix everything: structure, content, language, style, readability, clarity and logic, spelling, punctuation and grammar. It includes applying styles to all text and generating automated tables of content.

Once in a while a full restructure or rewrite is necessary, but usually it entails a thorough edit and, if necessary, pointing out overall weaknesses the author should address and making suggestions about how to fix them.

2. Copy edit. This involves looking at consistency of language, spelling, vocabulary, grammar and punctuation. It includes checking capitals and hyphenation consistency (hyphens, ems and en rules). For government and corporate jobs it also includes checking in-house style, references and glossaries, tables and graphs, heading levels and applying styles to all text and generating tables of content.

3. Proofread. This is exactly what it sounds like. A proofread is usually done after the document has been typeset and is ready to be printed. It’s the final check to make sure everything is okay. You make sure the formatting is correct and also check for overlooked typos.

However, with a copy edit and even proofreads, if I find something I think should be addressed I will make a note of it for the client without attempting to fix it.

I use tracked changes so the client can see exactly what I’ve done. It’s up to them to accept or reject my changes.

And now for the editor’s secret.

What is it?

It’s a one-on-one proofread.

This is instead of the single editor proofread.

It consists of one editor reading out loud from the final copy before it was typeset. The text obviously mirrors the text in the typeset document.

This read includes everything: capitals, paragraph breaks, widows/orphans, etc. It also includes formatting—by that I mean bold and italics, indents, justification, inter and intra paragraph spacing etc.

The second editor checks the typeset document against what is being read.

They both use rulers to focus on one line at a time.

It’s not usual with private jobs because only one editor is involved, but it is commonplace in departmental editing where there are several editors on the team, at least in the departments I worked in.

Try it. In my experience you find all sorts of discrepancies including spelling, punctuation and grammar typos.

That was great, thank you, Alana. My editor not only finds errors (fortunately not that many) but also comes up with some wonderful suggestions and it sounds like you love your ‘job’ too.

Alana’s family immigrated to Australia from the UK when she was four and bought land an hour south of Adelaide.  For the next 15 years she explored her way through school, the beach, roaming as far as her bike would take her in a day, and books. In 1966 she met John, married him the next year, and the year after had twins, Simone and Simon— Alana and John still get ribbed about that. Three years later Nicole joined the team—for a moment they thought she was twins too, and joke now that it would have been Nicole and Nicholas.  You can imagine the derision!

In 1980 they moved to Canberra to further their careers until 2004 when they moved to Queensland, spending five years there before moving back to Canberra because they missed their family. They also now spend time in the UK with Simone, her husband and two sons. Alana’s website is http://alanawoods.com and you can read our interview and Alana’s spotlight.

      

If you would like to write a writing-related guest post for my blog then feel free to email me with an outline of what you would like to write about. If it’s writing-related then it’s highly likely I’d email back and say “yes please”.

The blog interviews return as normal tomorrow morning with Jessica Chambers – the three hundred and forty-third of my blog interviews with novelists, poets, short story authors, bloggers, autobiographers and more. A list of interviewees (blogged and scheduled) can be found here. If you like what you read, please do go and investigate further. And I enjoy hearing from readers of my blog; do either leave a comment on the relevant interview (the interviewees love to hear from you too!) and / or email me. You can also read / download my eBooks and free eShorts at Smashwords, Sony Reader Store, Barnes & Noble, iTunes Bookstore and Kobo.  My eBooks are now on Amazon, with more to follow, and I also have a quirky second-person viewpoint story in charity anthology Telling Tales. 

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