The Drudgery of Proofing...

As most on this forum have probably discovered, self-proofing of your book is almost impossible. The eye of the reader will automatically correct what the hand has written, if they belong to the same person. And as most self-publishers don’t wish to spend a grand or so for a professional proofer, what do they do?

Here is the saga that I went through. Perchance it may help others.

My first book was a success on Amazon, with good comments overall, but many complaints about the bad proofing. That was a surprise, since I had carefully reread my own work many times to give corrections. That is when I began to realize the fallacy of proofing one’s own work. As I said, the reader of his/her own writing will just flat NOT see many errors. As an instance, I have the quirk that I write though when I mean through. I don’t know why, but it happens constantly. And when I read back my writings, I also see the word through and not the incorrect though.

I found early on that multiple rereadings do not work, unless the ground rules are changed. This is what I now do.

Firstly, I wrote a Perl script (I have programming experience back many decades) that will find hard errors - mismatched or missing quotes. Those are many and easy to detect, as are missing periods, split words (where ever, when ever), missing apostrophes (thats, theres), orphaned characters (there are the boat s). In addition, there is a text file of words to look for that probably are in error. In Roman times, the word sail can be used many times, but since Walmart didn’t exist, the term sale is probably wrong. And in those pre-electronic times, solder rather than soldier is a no-no (another often mistake by myself and spellcheck doesn’t see the problem as both words are good English.) Duped words are a problem not easily seen but easily found programmatically (He will take it to to the boat.)

The program gives the context of the error in the sentence, which makes it easy to find almost instantly in Scrivener.

That being done, I next run the book through the Grammerly.com service. At first, I thought that this was about useless, as it flags about a thousand grammar errors per page, but I found that it allowed me to see many errors in my structure. Not all, but a lot. Of course, it chokes on Ancient Roman flavor words such as overgarbed and dazement, not to mention something like Ypoploíarchos (the first mate of a Greek boat)

Then my long suffering wife gets the script, and she is a good proofreader, finding almost all of the remaining errors.

Finally, I port the book to a different device. A Kindle, then my laptop, then probably to my huge 27” iMac. For whatever reason, the different displays allow you to “reset” your proofing and see what might have been missed on the last device. Why? I don’t know - maybe size, posture, keyboard noise…

By now the book has been read at least a half dozen times, not including all the scanning during the actual writing, as I start another day and read what was written in the last session just to make sure that I am up to speed on the plot.

Then, it goes on Amazon. I monitor my email very closely for the first week because, guess what? In come the reports (from some very kind and wonderful fans) with lists of errors in spelling, or punctuation, or even “…in chapter 14, Julius is speaking to his wife at the table, but on the next page, he is just coming through the door.”

The irony is that, even years later, I can read my first books again and still find the occasional error.

Maybe the above will help someone in their writing.

As an aside, what I am finding interesting these days is the number of typos that I find in hard published books. So… Am I now just better at finding such errors through hard-won practice, or have the bean counters at the publishing companies decided that money paid to proofreaders might be better used in management bonuses?

Ken Farmer

 

Correct. Bad choice of terms on my part. It was copy-editors that I got quotes from. It was a long time ago but I remember quotes along the lines of $20 / 1000 words and such. Or $5 / page. That ran the price up to several thousand. And for something that to me is a hobby.

I don't remember hitting any sites that just offered proofreading, which I consider just a human spell checker. That would be far better than a computer checker but still, more needs to be looked at than just the problem of to/too/two, hear/here, and there/their.

At least, for my writing.

 

One tactic I heard was finding a tool to tell you which words you use most/least, and going through the least common ones, because typos aren't as regular as the correct spelling.

Could work