Proofreading

I reached a point earlier this year where I needed to make some extra money, in order to pay off some bills. The local fast-food restaurants were hiring, but I did that as a teenager, and I didn’t want to go backwards. I retired from my day job in 2011, and I was used to staying home, or going out to run errands, whenever I wanted. I wanted something part-time that I could do at home.

After looking around at various possibilities, I decided to take some training on how to proofread other people’s work. I felt I was halfway there already, since a typo or misplaced word always made me stop reading to figure out what was amiss.

I worked my way through the lessons, and the quizzes at the end of each lesson. Most of the lessons I was familiar with, but I even mastered the quizzes having to do with punctuating dependent clauses and participial phrases, when one or the other was all I had to worry about. I got through all the lessons and then downloaded 40 practice essays to proofread and 2 worksheets to do. These are to be done before I take the final exam. I have worked my way through half of them so far.

The actual proofreading is not as easy as I thought it would be, even though I can (and should) do as much research as I need to do. I always have the Chicago Manual of Style (CMOS), a dictionary, and Google open and ready on my computer when I start to proofread. And still I make mistakes.

First, CMOS is not the easiest manual to figure out. Sometimes I can’t find anything on the problem I’m looking for, possibly because I don’t know what kind of sentence I’m looking at. Is one of the clauses dependent? Is one of these clauses actually a participial phrase? I’ve decided to go back and restudy the lessons on these sentence parts before I attempt to proofread any more practice essays.

Second, some of the subject matter (like music), I don’t know anything about, and that makes it hard to catch misspelled words. In another essay, it mentioned a Japanese management method, and it capitalized the name. The name wasn’t in the dictionary, but Google knew what it was, and it capitalized the name every time, even in the middle of a sentence. So I didn’t correct it, only to be told that it should have been uncapped and italicized, as a foreign word.

Third, there are a lot of times when I don’t think 2 words should be joined as one word, but the dictionary says they are. I catch some of them, but frequently, I don’t catch them all. I have to be more diligent in looking up 2 words that might be joined into one word.

No, it’s not as easy as I thought it would be. I always go through these essays 3 and 4 times, trying to catch all the mistakes. But that just means that once I start proofreading for real, I will earn every penny I charge.

On the upside, I dug out my old college textbook from my English class. I started a ‘cheat sheet’ on parts of sentences to help me figure out if I’m looking at a clause or just a phrase, and how to punctuate it. I read that cheat sheet every day to remind myself what’s on it, and it has become another resource I have ready and at hand when I’m proofing. My number of mistakes has gone down, and they are rarely mistakes about where to put a comma. So I’m making progress.