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National Proofreading Day 2025
Today is National Proofreading Day, highlighting the need to execute a series of editorial passes on your work before publishing.
Reading Your Own Mind
And then there is that other thing: when you think you are reading proof, whereas you are merely reading your own mind; your statement of the thing is full of holes & vacancies but you don’t know it, because you are filling them from your mind as you go along. Sometimes — but not often enough — the printer’s proof-reader saves you — & offends you — with this cold sign in the margin: (?) & you search the passage & find that the insulter is right — it doesn’t say what you thought it did: the gas-fixtures are there, but you didn’t light the jets. ~Mark Twain
It’s absolutely true. When you read through what you wrote, you pretty much always echo back the voice in your head that stated what you think you wrote.
A typical gloss-over read before sending usually doesn’t reveal what might be glaring errors to a pair of fresh eyes.
Those don’t have to be a 3rd party. If you give yourself a minute and come back to your work with fresh eyes that see what’s there rather than what you think is there, you can proofread your own work.
That’s fine for a potentially inflammatory email or social media post, but it’s several degrees more difficult for a long piece of work such as a story, technical specification or scholarly work.
Fortunately, there are armies of professional proofreaders out there who can parse extensive works and give you a full list of corrections.
Even more fortunately, there are a variety of software services that can do the same thing nearly instantaneously.
Both cost money. If you don’t have money, you need to take the time to do what a live or virtual proofreader would do if you had the money to pay them.
But Rob, you whine, I don’t know what that consists of!
Continue reading, I have some simple tips videos in the next section. If you click through to YouTube, you’ll find even more how-to videos.
Proofreading
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One of the most powerful pieces of proofreading advice I’ve heard is that you should read your work backwards.
Reading backwards makes misspelled or even incorrect word choices jump off the page.
There are a variety of counterintuitive techniques that you can employ to clean up your work before pressing send.
In 👓You’re🖋️Your Underwear
Writing without revising is the literary equivalent of waltzing gaily out of the house in your underwear. ~Patricia Fuller
It really depends, doesn’t it?
Sometimes, you just want to go balls to the wall on social media.
Sometimes you’re so triggered that you just need to snap back.
That’s life, isn’t it?
Well, even then it helps to make your point if you’re not introducing odd misspellings, grammatical errors or logical fallacies.
But whatcha gonna do? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
As far as more substantial works, you should definitely take the time and effort to polish your work before publishing.
Another thing that “they” say is that you shouldn’t write creatively and edit at the same time.
Sorry, y’all, I can’t refrain from doing so. I’ve been writing software in one form or another for over three decades.
If you jump to a new line with errors present, your program simply won’t work.
I’ve gotten into the habit of simultaneously cranking out story while also scanning in real-time for misspellings, word choice, flow and overall consistency.
That’s not the norm. What’s recommended is that you put on your artsy-fartsy hat for writing, put the document on ice for some time and then come back with your editor hat on.
That seems insanely inefficient to me. I don’t know that I could pull that off.
Even when I’m totally in the zone and am one with the story, I’m still scrutinizing the story as it flows from my keystrokes.
That’s my process. If you can do the hat swapping thing and that works for you, great. It’s not for me.
But, as Mark Twain observed (above), self-editing only gets you so far.
You become blind to simple things because you knew what you wanted to say.
Your mind tends to project that over what you’re actually seeing on the page.
This is where it’s good to have an independent editor, proofreader and other specialists to analyze your work empirically.
Fortunately, I have ProWritingAid and AutoCrit to do this for me. I love the lifetime membership options for SaaS programs of this kind.
What I paid to get perpetual access to these tools is a drop in the bucket to hiring people to receive these services.
Naturally, the people still do a better and more thorough job, but they also cost that much more because of it.
If you want to publish a book, you either need a fat wallet or someone else who does.
If you have neither, you’d better be prepared to put in the work to do it all yourself.
That’s all for today. See you on Wednesday for a topic related to cookies 👧🏻, but not exclusively so.