Summer Reprise Series #8: Proofreading Epiphanies Revealed

Summer Reprise Series #8: Proofreading Epiphanies Revealed

First published April 21, 2015

If you don’t dread the final technical edit of your manuscript before submission for publication, perhaps you should. 

More on this thought next week.

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 your manuscript may be significantly lower than mine is.

If, however, you are the final technical editor—along with being the author, the 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.

You can see paragraph marks and a page break as I see them when I'm composing.

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!

This is a screenshot at 250% of the actual size font.
Notice that paragraph marks, etc., are not visible.

Above is a screenshot of part of a page of the technical edit I was working on when writing this blog. I've highlighted an offending extra word in red.

One new idea for this reprise.

Change the background color of your manuscript on your monitor while you edit.

 

In Word, changing the background color is one of the options in the Layout tab. Black is NOT your only choice.

Highlighted menu bar for Word-MAC 2011

You will be pleasantly surprised how that novelty view improves your ability to see “wrong” things.

Unless I have a L-O-N-G manuscript, I switch between magnification levels when editing, but I keep the same background color during a session. I like black and this color, or blue. Change your font color to white for best contrast. White. White. White.

Next blog: Not Quite Random Thoughts on Revising What You’ve Written

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