Long day

[redbird]

I got home just after 8 this evening; cattitude expressed surprise when I said "I came straight home from work." I was there until 7:15, making copies of corrected PDFs before they went back to the printer.

The only thing unusual about this was the timing, which was late because the design side of proofreading did a second pass after someone noticed how bad the contrast was on some of the illustrations. Other than that, the usual selection of minor fixes, things I caught by sheer chance because there was no special reason to even look at that line at this stage of proofs, and one significant catch in the latter category: we're reprinting the Gettysburg Address as part of the "Read Aloud Anthology", selections of stories, nonfiction, and poetry for teachers to read to their classes and discuss. (There's quite a bit of other good stuff in there; light-years above Dick and Jane.) I'm not sure why I actually looked at the text, but I did. Thus, I noticed an important missing word: "little," as in "men will little note nor long remember what we say here." I then went back to my desk, let Google take me to the Library of Congress's collection of Lincoln's papers, and printed out one of his drafts of the Gettysburg Address. I was right: "four score," two words, and "upon this continent," not "on."

All well and good, it will be fixed, and I'm pleased with myself--but it should have been caught sooner, except that it's far too easy to not actually see text that you know well.

Comments

[brooksmoses]

...it's far too easy to not actually see text that you know well.

This is why, in theory, one proofreads that sort of thing by taking a known-good copy and a coworker, and reading the words from the proof aloud in a slow monotone to the coworker who is following in the known-good text, yes?

(At least, that was the suggestion from a book on typesetting that I was reading recently. It seemed to make sense to me, but I have no idea if anyone actually does it that way.)

[redbird]

Almost nobody seems to proofread that way anymore.

In the case of the stuff I'm working on (I came to this project very late in its cycle), ideally the texts themselves should have been clean some time ago, and we should only have been changing the illustrations and the educational adornments--suggestions for discussion, questions, and the like. Of course, in that theory artwork would not be randomly reversed between passes, and spaces would not materialize in the middle of words when nothing in the paragraph was supposed to be changed.

[orangemike.livejournal.com]

That's how Cicatrice and I do it. Helps to live with another write, it does.

[callunav.livejournal.com]

Good for you for catching them.

I memorized that in fourth grade and think I still have it complete....I'll have to go check myself, now.

[juliansinger.livejournal.com]

She is, in fact, reciting it right now.

A few bobbles, but...

[wild-irises.livejournal.com]

I'm very divorced from the proofreading function at work, but yesterday I was in an editor's cube and saw "inside the mind of America's deadiest killer" on a jacket proof. Apparently no one else had noticed it ... and our crew is good. You can never have too many eyes on something.