Proofreading
I reached a pointearlier this year where I needed to make some extra money, in order to pay offsome bills. The local fast-food restaurants were hiring, but I did that as ateenager, and I didn’t want to go backwards. I retired from my day job in 2011,and I was used to staying home, or going out to run errands, whenever I wanted.I wanted something part-time that I could do at home.
After looking around atvarious possibilities, I decided to take some training on how to proofreadother people’s work. I felt I was halfway there already, since a typo ormisplaced word always made me stop reading to figure out what was amiss.
I worked my way throughthe lessons, and the quizzes at the end of each lesson. Most of the lessons Iwas familiar with, but I even mastered the quizzes having to do withpunctuating dependent clauses and participial phrases, when one or the other was all I had to worry about. I got through all the lessonsand then downloaded 40 practice essays to proofread and 2 worksheets to do.These are to be done before I take the final exam. I have worked my way throughhalf of them so far.
The actual proofreadingis not as easy as I thought it would be, even though I can (and should) do asmuch research as I need to do. I always have the Chicago Manual of Style (CMOS),a dictionary, and Google open and ready on my computer when I start toproofread. And still I make mistakes.
First, CMOS is not theeasiest manual to figure out. Sometimes I can’t find anything on the problem I’mlooking for, possibly because I don’t know what kind of sentence I’m lookingat. Is one of the clauses dependent? Is one of these clauses actually aparticipial phrase? I’ve decided to go back and restudy the lessons on thesesentence parts before I attempt to proofread any more practice essays.
Second, some of thesubject matter (like music), I don’t know anything about, and that makes ithard to catch misspelled words. In another essay, it mentioned a Japanesemanagement method, and it capitalized the name. The name wasn’t in thedictionary, but Google knew what it was, and it capitalized the name everytime, even in the middle of a sentence. So I didn’t correct it, only to be toldthat it should have been uncapped and italicized, as a foreign word.
Third, there are a lotof times when I don’t think 2 words should be joined as one word, but thedictionary says they are. I catch some of them, but frequently, I don’t catchthem all. I have to be more diligent in looking up 2 words that might be joinedinto one word.
No, it’s not as easy asI thought it would be. I always go through these essays 3 and 4 times, tryingto catch all the mistakes. But that just means that once I start proofreadingfor real, I will earn every penny I charge.
On the upside, I dugout my old college textbook from my English class. I started a ‘cheat sheet’ onparts of sentences to help me figure out if I’m looking at a clause or just aphrase, and how to punctuate it. I read that cheat sheet every day to remindmyself what’s on it, and it has become another resource I have ready and athand when I’m proofing. My number of mistakes has gone down, and they arerarely mistakes about where to put a comma. So I’m making progress.
