I have been proofreading my book about Nocturnes, which has reached the stage of being typeset. This is the point at which it starts to look like a proper book. As the author, you dare to believe that it will one day really be published and start to live in heads other than yours.
In the old days, the publisher used to send an enormous sheaf of typeset pages, from which you did the proofreading, sitting in an armchair, marking the pages manually with special proofreading symbols before posting the enormous sheaf of pages back and keeping your fingers crossed that it wouldn’t get lost in the post, because there was no backup version. Now the PDF arrives electronically, and corrections are done on computer. I must say I miss the crisp white physical pages that used to arrive at this stage.
Proofreading your own text is so difficult. I find that if I focus in narrowly and read every word one by one, I lose the sense of whether the whole sentence makes sense and is correct. On the other hand, if I allow myself to enter the flow of the sentence, I see what I’m expecting to see (having written the sentence) and am liable to miss tiny errors such as an apostrophe facing the wrong way. It’s easy enough to spot an error such as a phrase accidentally repeated, but a missing phrase is quite hard to spot.
There must be some happy medium, where your eye lights briefly on each word but not for so long that you lose the thread of the whole phrase. It’s like sightreading, in a way, but also not like sightreading because I know already (or should know) what the whole thing consists of.
Luckily, a professional proofreader will be checking the text as well, so it’s not all dependent on me. But I wonder how professional proofreaders can know if there are errors of sense or fact, or missing sentences? I guess that stage is supposed to have been covered by the copy-editor previously, leaving the proofreader to check for obvious glitches.
Proofreading anything on a screen seems to use a completely different path in the brain. With scores, I print the pdfs out, make the corrections on the physical printout, then go to the screen and put those corrections in.
I can well understand Mary Cohen printing work out to make corrections on paper – I am often astonished how differently things can read on paper rather than screen. There may be a reason for this, or it may be just that I was raised with pre-digital habits….
Mary has an interesting theory that the brain works differently when processing information from a screen. Intuitively it feels as though this must be so, but I’ve never read an explanation of why the brain ‘reads’ differently from a screen and from a piece of paper. Perhaps someone will enlighten us!
Perhaps it has something to do with the physicality of print, its presence in the world. I similarly prefer David Hockney’s conventional paintings to his i-Pad ones, wonderful as those are…
Perhaps the fact I proof read from paper printouts with a pencil in my hand, or check scores playing an instrument, adds an extra connection in the brain.
Curiously, we received today final copies of a rather wonderful book for which my wife, Joyce, acted as editor and proofreader. And although we are both quite good at proofreading, I think that Joyce’s cast of mind gives her advantages. If we go (say) through Edinburgh towards Dunbar, Joyce has a ribbon in her mind, with a picture of every junction and a mental note of the best way to handle each one. I have only the vaguest visual imagery, but a kind of geographical sense, so that it might not much matter to me if we were on the wrong road entirely, as long as it would lead in the right direction. I seem to notice that the ribbon-making mind goes very well with proofreading. Certainly Joyce’s eye for detail made my book about listening a much better book than otherwise it would have been. And I often hear somebody play and will say, ‘I just heard something off there’, and then I have to examine the score to find out what it was. As for your question, ‘I wonder how professional proofreaders can know if there are errors of sense or fact, or missing sentences?’ – I would say that Joyce asks herself all the time, ‘Does this make sense TO ME?’ and has a kind of sixth sense for missing meaning, as for the missing comma.
Joyce sounds like the ideal proofreader (and editor). How nice for you to have her on your team, Rob!