Proofreading Epiphany Revealed
If you don’t dread the final technical edit of your
manuscript before submission for publication, perhaps you should.
If you work with a proofreader or copy editor, your level of
concern about “your/you, a/as,” etc., the now extra words you missed deleting
when you revised that lame sentence into a wordsmithed gem, and other gaffs
that lower the level of professionalism in you manuscript may be much lower
than mine is.
If, however, you are that final technical editor—along with
author, content editor, etc.—for your books, you probably feel my pain.
I described a trick I stumbled upon that helped me find
several of those issues earlier in my booklet, Book
Creation – Volume 2 – A Science Guy’s Exploration of Publishing Resources. Today’s
blog is a short and hopefully sweet description of another serendipitous proofreading
tip.
When I write, I have paragraph marks, section and page
breaks, and spaces between words all visible. In MSWord, you can find this icon
(¶) in the top menu bar. That’s a toggle switch between showing/hiding those
markings. I usually hide those marks when I’m doing the technical edit.
What I’ve found over time is that, even if I wait a week or
more between my last revision and the technical edit, I’m still so close to the
text, that my brain often sees what’s supposed to be in the text—not what
actually is.
Try this.
Switch the page
magnification about every ten pages or so while looking for technical fixes.
I’ve found that periodically changing the size of the page
between 150% and 250% causes my brain to re-adjust enough that typos and extra
words are much more quickly spotted. It's amazing how obvious awful most of those errors look when they pretty much fill your computer monitor!
Above is a screenshot of part of a page of the technical edit I'm working on on April 13. I've highlighted an offending extra word in red.
Above is a screenshot of part of a page of the technical edit I'm working on on April 13. I've highlighted an offending extra word in red.
Next blog: Emoting on Editing
No comments:
Post a Comment