Writers and Mistakes

Writers are human, so we make mistakes. But with so many writers out there pitching ideas and looking for work, all it takes is one little mistake for your work to be deleted from an editor's e-mail (or tossed into her File 13, if it's snail mail). Today I had a cringe-inducing moment that reminded me of the old carpenter's adage: Measure twice, cut once. For writers, I'd alter it to read: Proofread ten times, hit send once.

I'd spent the better part of an hour carefully crafting a letter, re-working my resume, and selecting the best clip for the job. I was so involved in polishing my e-mail that until the moment I pressed send, I didn't notice that I'd somehow left the subject line blank. Now, in most cases that's just an annoyance, but in this case the text of the subject line was a part of specific directions for this job. Yelling at my computer did nothing. I did not have an "unsend" option. Worst of all, I had described myself--in my much-labored-over e-mail--as "detail oriented." Gasp.

I had two options. First, I could simply ignore the error and hope my e-mail got to the right person, but the subject line was essential because it contained her name. Second, I could re-send with a corrected subject line and an apology for any confusion my first e-mail might have caused. I went with Option Two. I decided that acknowledging and correcting my mistake at least indicated I'd been paying attention--if a bit too late.

Someone should invent an add-on to e-mail for writers, another step that pops up after you hit send that says, "Are you sure? Proofread it again."
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Picture by Zsuzsanna Kilian at http://www.sxc.hu/photo/1218052

Proofreading: The Blogger’s Bugaboo

The only thing that gives me comfort about typos and other icky errors in my blog posts is the knowledge that I am not alone. In this new age of blogs (and other types of self-publishing), mistakes like typos and misspelling can easily slip through the proofreading gaps to mess up a writer's perfectly brilliant post.

Murphy’s Law comes into play for me, because whenever I’m sending out loads of proposals and queries (all with links to my blogs), that’s when I find big, fat, embarrassing mistakes that ruin my punch lines or points. Yesterday I fixed some whoppers, and if a friend hadn't e-mailed me about my garbled words, my mistakes might have gone uncorrected for a long time. What’s a writer to do? How can a blogger keep her work clean and error free?

Here are a few of my strategies for avoiding (and correcting) those cringe-inducing mistakes:

1. If a post can wait overnight before it goes on your blog, let it sit before you give it a final proofing. This is the technique I use with all my print articles, and so far it's kept my print work very clean (and my editors happy). Unfortunately, the immediacy of blogging means it's not always possible/desirable to wait until tomorrow. If it can’t sit overnight, let it sit for at least 30 minutes, preferably longer. Your brain’s proofreading abilities work much better when you put some time between creating and correcting.

2. Proof from a hard-copy, if possible.

3. Read your work out loud.

4. Ask a writing (or English-savvy) friend to proofread your posts; this is what I do. Unless you ask for proofing help, some folks may be reluctant to tell you about your mistakes. (And we all know a few people who are just delighted to point out errors. Proceed with caution if you choose one of them to be your proofer. That’s a topic for another post.)

5. Re-read your own posts frequently. In fact, re-read large chunks of your blog on a regular basis to make corrections and/or post updates.

6. Know your weak points. In my case, if I become passionate about a topic and compose on the fly, right there on Blogger’s posting page instead of in Word, I tend to hyper-focus on the topic and miss errors. (My post on book banning became a grammar victim due to this hyper-focus.) I also have a tendency to leave words behind when I’m cutting and pasting in the throes of editing, which makes my sentences read like alphabet soup.

7. Accept that you will make mistakes. Put a good proofing system in place, and use it. I tell my writers that their work can be published or perfect, but rarely will it be both.
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Picture courtesy of Piotr Lewandowski at http://www.sxc.hu/photo/428206

The Proofreader’s Story: A Writer’s Fairy Tale

Once upon a time, the Proofreader held an exalted place in the Kingdom of the Writer. She spoke to the Writer every day; her opinion was valued. Then one day, Spell Check and Grammar Check arrived. They didn’t think the Writer needed the Proofreader anymore, so the two of them pushed the Proofreader off the top of the Tower of Thesaurus. “You old-fashioned biddy,” they jeered. “We don’t need your books or your red pens. We’re new technology, and now the Writer doesn’t need you anymore.”

The Proofreader was undaunted. She shouted, “You two wouldn’t know a homonym if it smacked you in the face!” She marched to the castle’s front door and pounded on it. She was so angry that all of her commas fell out of her pockets. The Writer herself answered the door.

“Do you know that Spell Check and Grammar Check just threw me off the roof?” The Proofreader was indignant. “And Grammar Check can’t even conjugate correctly!”

The Writer cleared her throat. “I think that’s a rather personal matter, don’t you?”

“You can’t be serious about exiling me from the castle! You can’t trust your important work to those two jokers!” The Proofreader stomped her foot so hard that all of her paragraph marks spilled onto the ground and got tangled up with the commas.

“Poor, poor proofreader. Go look up Luddite. You can stay in the pantry if you feel you must stick around,” the Writer said. “The Checker Twins are just so much easier, even if I don’t always understand the corrections they make.” And the Writer shut the door, leaving the Proofreader to wander the grounds aimlessly.

But the Checker Twins were rash and impetuous. They changed the Writer’s word processing settings so they were allowed to make automatic corrections. The Writer wrote: The sun rose in a burst of flames, drowning the darkness. The Checker Twins changed it to: The rosy flames burned the night. “Why did you change this?” the Writer demanded. “We’re not sure,” the Checker Twins told her. “We can't really tell you. According to our rule book, it's supposed to read like that, but the truth is that we just liked it better that way.” Soon the Writer was spending all of her time arguing with the Checker Twins.

At the end of the week, the Writer went looking for the Proofreader. The Proofreader was sitting under a tree, taking notes on the colors of the flowers. She asked the Writer, “What do you think? Would you call this red or maroon? Maybe blood red? Perhaps vermillion?”

“I don’t know,” the Writer said. “But I do know it takes an actual human being to contemplate the difference. Will you come back and help me get rid of the Checker Twins?”

“So my extra eyes are better than those automated twits?” the Proofreader asked.

The Writer nodded her head affirmatively. “Nuance isn’t their strong point.”

“New Aunts? New Ants? New Age?” called the voice of the Checker Twins. They were searching for the Writer.

“Follow me,” said the Writer to the Proofreader. “Let’s disable them before they replace anything else.”

Writers: Do you have a flesh-and-blood proofreader, or do you rely on Word’s automated features?
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Photo courtesy of Mario Sanchez at http://www.sxc.hu/photo/1101745