Comments on: The 5 Steps of Intelligent Proofreading

By: Michael W. Perry

Michael W. Perry — Sun, 23 Dec 2012 20:28:32 +0000

I’ll second Marilyn’s remark about the value of text-to-speech. By using another sense, it gets around the problem of seeing what we think is there rather than what is really there. The best way is to have the text read to you while you follow along. The most dangerous sorts of typos are those that make grammatical sense. I once found one where “now” was substituted for “not.” With practice, you can even develop and ear that picks up the difference in pause, in some text-to-speech software, between a period and a comma.

SBT is also right about regular expression searches. I once had to clean up an OCRed document for Microsoft that was filled with the letter l substituted for the number 1. The two didn’t look that different, so finding them by eye would have been a pain. Instead, I did massive search and replaces. That was much quicker and error free.

I’d add another suggestion for those who’ve got an epaper reader or a tablet. Export what you’re proofing to it. The change in appearance from your computer screen will make many typos pop out just as effectively as printing to paper and without the expense of paper.

By: SBT

SBT — Sat, 22 Dec 2012 19:04:40 +0000

I am also just a happy amateur, but I have found great use for regular expressions when proofreading. They can test for nonsense like a capital letter immediately after a lower case one, a numeral immediately after a letter, a punctuation mark immediately before a letter, all isolated letters except ‘a’ etc. etc.

When proofreading, I like to create a document with the scan as an image on one side and the OCR’ed text on the other, so it is straightforward to compare the OCR with the source. The problem with proofreading without the source immediately available is that errors are not always readily apparent from the ocr text; even complete lines can go missing sometimes and the text will still make sense.

By: Marilynn Byerly

Marilynn Byerly — Sat, 22 Dec 2012 16:14:22 +0000

I’m not a professional proofreader, but I’ve done the electronic galleys of all my books before they were published. Here’s my usual recommendations to other writers. They can use only one method or do several proofs using different methods each time.

Use text to speech, all computers come with it, to have your computer read it aloud. In the preferences, set the talking speed a bit faster than usual so you won’t lose focus.

Change the font and text size. Make it much bigger than normal so those misplaced commas really stand out. If you begin to skim, change the size again.

If you have an ereader, transfer your book to it.