We all use the spell-check and grammar-check, (at least I hope so), but there are many things that those handy features won’t catch, such as homophones (every writer’s sworn enemy), misspellings that are actual words, and missing words like a and the. This last error can make you sound like Boris Badanov. Only careful rereading will catch any of these.
I’ve been a member of an on-line writer’s workshop for three years, and I’ve noticed something that might sound weird: It’s easier to spot other people’s errors than it is your own. That’s because your eyes start seeing what your fingers intended to type, but didn’t. I’m not harsh to people who don’t catch all the typos, because I know that I’ve probably missed a few in my own stories. If you have the money, spend it on a professional proofreader. This isn’t cheap; most SPAs are on their own.
I read an editor’s site once; she offered a proofreading quiz to anyone who was interested in being an editor. The qualifying score was 100%. If this sounds a bit hard-nosed, think for a second. Let’s say that the allowed score was 98%, or two errors out of a hundred. In a 95,000 word manuscript (the length of my own two completed books) 2% is nineteen-hundred. That’s a lot of mistakes.
So we get to work, reading carefully, concentrating strictly on the words, ignoring their meaning and the story we’re telling with them. Teh for the, form for from, though for thought. It’s numbing. In the end, you hope you’ve caught everything. I thought I had caught everything with The Bretton Katt Alliance; it turns out that I missed a few (a corrected edition will be out in a couple of months). Trust me, nothing makes the stomach roil and the sweat break out like the discovery of post-publication errors. We love our books, and we want to do right by them. It’s only fair to readers, and to ourselves, that we put out the best possible product. (But I can do without reviewers whose snide comments imply that you didn't proofread at all).
That said, I don’t understand why some people are more judgmental of SPAs than they are of more famous, best-selling writers. One post on an Amazon board even said that best-selling authors had ‘earned the right’ to be sloppy. With the money that some of these people get, you’d think readers would hold them to the highest standard. Nobody has the right to be sloppy.
In the past few years I’ve seen errors in books by some major writers (I won’t mention names), mistakes that somebody on the proofreading staff should have caught and fixed. But proofreaders, like self-published authors who must do their own proofing, are only human beings, and human beings aren’t perfect. We must keep some perspective. We’re not surgeons; errors are annoying, even unprofessional, but no one will die because of an error in a novel (at least I hope not).
So once more we open the file, and begin, line by line, until our eyes get tired and we must stop for now. We find another two or three mistakes that we missed the other day. We fix them and close the file. And tomorrow we’ll do it again.
