COMMON GROUND

Proofreaders' marks are standard, and should be familiar to anyone who works with printed documents. It's important that these symbols be used consistently when communicating changes to the typesetter who is preparing your documents. If you make up your own proofreading symbols the typesetter may interpret them in a totally different manner.

The good news is, proofreading (as well as making corrections) is much simpler today than it was in the days of hand-set type. Much of the proofreader's job involved searching for and fixing problems that were caused by the type itself. Just a few examples: the down-pointing arrow means "push down risen spacing material". Remember, those spaces between the words were pieces of metal, just like the letters. The notation "wf" means "wrong font." It's very rare for this type of error to occur using today's word-processing software.

FIRST THINGS FIRST

Some persons are under the misconception that the proofreading process begins only after you receive your first typeset proof from your printer. Nothing could be further from the truth. The creation and production of any printed piece is a multi-step process, with decisions being made by customer, designer and printer along each step of the way.

When your printer receives your original text, whether it be on typewritten pages or on a computer disk, it should be correct and complete. That means that the first round of proofreading should begin before the job is even submitted to your printer's prepress department. Extensive editorial changes made after the typesetting process will incur additional charges. If possible, create your text using a popular word processing/page creation program and supply it to your printer on disk. This will not only minimize errors made by the typesetter, but you will avoid being charged for the time it would take the typesetter to retype what you have already written. Of course, some manual work may still be required (the resetting of headlines or equations, for example).

The format in which you save your text to disk will be dependent on the particular hardware/software combination both you and your typesetter are using.

When you receive your first typeset proof from the printer, compare it carefully to your original copy. You may wish to use one color of pen, say red, to mark any mistakes made by the typesetter. Another color, say blue, can be used to indicate any changes made by you, the author. The use of color makes the corrections much easier for the typesetter to see, especially in a complex or lengthy document. The use of two colors will go a long way to ensure that you aren't inadvertently charged for mistakes made by the typesetter.

SPELL- AND GRAMMAR-CHECKING SOFTWARE

Special software to check both spelling and grammar are built into many software programs that are popular today. However, this software is not a substitute for careful proofreading.

Spell-checking software, for instance, does just that and nothing more. It looks at each word of your document, one by one, and searches an internal dictionary to see if that word appears there. If you have made a typographical error, such as writing is instead of if, the spell-checker will not catch it, since both words are in its dictionary. Likewise, some word pairs are easily confused, such as they're, there and their. In this case too, the spelling software will continue merrily on its way.

Grammar-checking software works differently, and may well indeed catch the types of errors shown above. Remember however, that the grammar-checker is operating with its own set of pre-defined internal rules. If you except every suggestion made by the software you will almost certainly wind up with a document that has had most of your personality stripped from it.

We make the following recommendation: take a dozen or so recent documents and allow your grammar-checker to look at them closely. You'll probably find there are one or two types of basic errors you make frequently. That knowledge will make it easier to spot those errors and to avoid them - you'll be on your way to becoming your own best proofreader!