If writing photo-captions is a challenge (as I explained in my last post), proofreading a forthcoming book is an exercise in humiliation. It brings you face to face with your egregious errors, your inconsistencies, your sloppiness, and your overconfidence in your own memory. And that’s even when the pages have already been scrutinized by half a dozen eagle-eyed readers. There has never been a time when I have not “signed off” the proofs – then, on opening the new book, been soon confronted with a missing word, or with “BCE” when it should be “CE”, etc. I always think I have got off lightly when the mistake is not in the first few pages. (To be honest most readers don’t notice, but one imagines that they do and that they judge you accordingly.)
Authors, I guess, are always the worst proofreaders of their own stuff, for the simple reason that they know what they wrote and tend to see it on the page even when it’s not there (if you see what I mean). There’s also the tendency to make a lot more mistakes about things that you know well and so haven’t triple checked, than about things you have had to look up carefully. Someone once pointed out that I had casually described Drusus (the Elder) as the cousin of the emperor Tiberius, when I knew perfectly well that they were brothers. How did I do it? Then a few years ago I spent an agonizing day away from my laptop (where I could check) imagining that I had got the date of the Crucifixion of Jesus wrong. I hadn’t, but I was gripped by shame at the thought of the awful error.
Some things no author will ever get right, even when they have a publisher’s style guide for reference. I challenge anyone consistently to use “face to face”, no hyphens, for the adverbial use of the term (“looking at him face to face”) and “face-to-face”, with hyphens, for the adjectival use (“face-to-face encounter”). And I have never internalized the different rules for numerals and words. At what point should words get replaced by numerals? (At ten or at twenty? And is it different, if it is the first word in a sentence?)
Even so, I would like to have it all right and consistent in the final printed version. Is there a secret?
Well, one tip is to read the whole book out loud slowly, carefully focusing on each individual word. That tends to catch the common “missing word problem”: “the style art” instead of “the style of art”. It can occasionally alert you to the most stupid mistakes (if you read out “Drusus, the emperor Tiberius’ cousin”, it really doesn’t sound right). And it is a great final check for the rhythms and cadences of the writing (which you might think don’t matter much on the printed page, but sure do).
Reading aloud doesn’t catch the inconsistencies and the rogue hyphens though. For that the only solution is to check by word-search every single spelling for which there might conceivably be an alternative. That was what I thought I had done this time. But when I compared notes with those of my brilliant assistant, who had also gone through the proof pages, somehow she had managed to find about twice as many inconsistencies as I had!
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