A religion editor I once knew had a page proof tacked to his office wall with a 60-point headline that read: “Interfaith service to be led by rabbit.”
“Roger or Bugs?” I asked when first seeing it.
His initial response was less than godly.
Turns out the headline had made its way all through the editing process and was ready to go to press when a copy editor proofing the page asked: “Don’t you mean rabbi?”
“Thank God for proofreaders,” he said, as he concluded his story about a mistake that slipped through the editing cracks and could have caused embarrassment had it not been caught.
I thank God for my proofreader every time I write something for publication. No matter how many times I read my own stuff, I inevitably miss something. Repeated words. Misspellings. Awkward sentences. And factual errors, caused by either brain farts or sloppy research.
Often, copy flaws result from my own obsessive over-polishing. The more I rewrite, the greater the likelihood I’ll smudge a once perfectly clear passage. The more times I read my own copy, the more likely I am to gloss over my mistakes because I lose my perspective or get bored by myself.
If I’m not on deadline and can leave it for a day or so, I’m better able to return to my scribbles with more objectivity and clarity. But in the end, I just can’t trust myself to get my own stuff right.
And because of my natural writer’s conceit that no one can improve on my brilliance, and my experience with oafish editors who get their vicarious thrills by leaving their own touch on writers’ copy, I find it difficult to trust anyone else to help.
I can’t help myself
But in the end, I’m always better served by putting my faith in some higher editorial power. A power who can save me from embarrassment, a lawsuit or – worst of all – readers who can’t abide sloppy prose.
Spell- and grammar-check programs installed on computers can help writers like me. And there are scads of discount online services that, in truth, just have more sophisticated computer programs.
But there’s no substitute for a person you trust to bare your copy to before hitting the send button.
I started writing an ode to proofreaders. But the more I think about it, that’s too narrow a focus. There was a time when the publishing process involved a series of skill sets — proofreading being a safety net to catch overlooked snafus.
But today, the process is compressed to the point where an individual can do it all.
Or much of it, anyway.
It certainly cuts down on labor costs and improves on the immediacy of delivering a message.
But the absence of filtering — from testing the veracity of statements to the clarity of expression to nitpicked proofreading — has led to lower standards, where more importance is put on SEO keywords than real words that are spelled right and are grammatically correct.
I’m no Luddite who advocates going back to the “Good Old Days” of hot type and copy boys. But I do long for a return to publishing — online or in print — where the scrutiny I identify with fine proofreading is the rule. And there are never religion editors pulling “rabbis” out of their hats.
