Proofreading

If there are too many errors in a book it can be very off putting when reading through it and can ruin the flow of the story so proofreading is essential. If you are able to it’s great if you can hire a proof reader but if you’re self-publishing, with the other costs involved, that may be a luxury you can’t afford. You can ask friends and family to read through the manuscript and look for mistakes but if the story is good the chances are they will get wrapped up in reading it and miss all the errors. That leaves the last resort. You have to trawl through the book repeatedly yourself, which is not ideal as there is an art to proof reading but at least hopefully you may find the majority of errors.

I found proofreading was one of the things that took the longest time in the whole publishing process and I still doubted that all the mistakes were eliminated. Someone told me the best way to proofread is to read something backwards as now you will read each word properly without your brain guessing what the word in the sentence is and seeing what it wants to see. Even if you adopt this approach I find you do still need to read the book through in order to find grammatical errors and words that are spelt correctly but do not fit in the sentence such as the following examples:

‘She was starring at the moon.’ Which should of course be: ‘She was staring at the moon.’

I noticed when writing this in a word processing software it did underline the incorrect word, in this case ‘starring’, but in the following examples it did not underline any of the words and accepted both to be correct.

‘He couldn’t bare the pain anymore.’ Which should be: ‘He couldn’t bear the pain anymore.’

‘He jumped over the worn, wooden style.’ Which should be: ‘He jumped over the worn, wooden stile.’ 

It’s the mistakes above that can be particularly difficult to pick up without the word processor's help and because our brains are too clever and will accept even incorrectly spelled words that look similar as we read words as a whole as opposed to every letter in a word. A good demonstration of this is how a lot of people, myself included, can make sense of and read the following gibberish.

Alpapertny it is psoilsbe for mnay ppeloe to raed wdors wehvetar oerdr the lertets are in the wrdos povdired taht the fsirt and lsat ltteer are in the rhigt pclae. Tihs fcat meaks porornfedaig all the mroe dilfiucft and is the rosaen you hvae to raed turgohh the mapcsniurt so mnay tmeis.

Embarrassingly when proofreading I found I had often mistyped certain words more frequently than others in my haste to get my ideas down and hadn’t even noticed the mistakes when editing. It was only when I came to the proofreading that I discovered I had to be more vigilant for these words, a few examples of which can be seen below.

The correct Off or of
The correct it’s or its
The correct their, they’re or there
The correct your or you’re
The correct to or too

There were many other mistyped words I discovered and corrected and maybe more that went unnoticed, though I hope not, but the process certainly gave me a healthy respect for the work professional proof readers do.