Editing: The Buck Should Not Stop At The Proofreader

Photo by Sarah Pflug at Burst

Have you ever read a book with so many mistakes in it you wondered whether it had ever been near a proofreader before it was published? Maybe you've felt so outraged that you've submitted a low rating and complained about the poor editing in your review? I hope this little article will explain why this happens and why the reader might just want to hold off from shooting the proofreader!

Think about the last time you did a spot-the-difference puzzle. You were probably told how many differences you needed to find – maybe ten. I imagine the first few probably jumped out at you pretty quickly but then you slowed down as you searched and compared the two pictures, and the last one may have taken you a very long time to spot. Now imagine that you had not been told how many differences there were, or you were given a range, say 5–15 differences. How long would it have been before you gave up finding that last one and decided you'd found them all? Or, if you had found all ten, how long would you have kept looking before you were sure there wasn't an eleventh? And now imagine that you have a time limit with this puzzle...

This is what proofreading is like, only on a massive scale – a novel can contain 140,000 words and hundreds of pages. Proofreaders are trained to know what to do with an error when they find it, and their powers of observation and concentration are excellent, but they don't know how many errors they're looking for and will rarely find everything in the time they have.

Now imagine a different scenario: You've got relatives visiting in three hours, so you've decided to give your house a good old clean, vacuuming, dusting, polishing etc, so it will be spotless. You're stood there, Henry-the-Hoover smiling at your side, when you realise you can't do any of that until you've tidied up all the mess and clutter that's lying around. There are coffee cups to clear away and wash up, piles of paperwork that need sorting, jumbled DVDs and cases strewn around the living room – all manner of stuff that you have to tidy up before you can even think about the cleaning. You set to work, picking up, washing up, sorting out until you're finally able to return to the patiently waiting Henry... but the doorbell goes, your relatives are here, and despite all your hard work, your house is still not clean!

For a number of reasons, a manuscript can be very, very messy. It can be riddled with typos, poor punctuation and spelling, homonyms, formatting errors etc, along with issues that are more of a copy-editing nature, like plot anomalies, clumsy sentence structure, anachronisms and such. But like the untidy house, if a proofreader is spending their time tidying up, they will never be able to clean up in the time they have to complete the job. This is probably the most common reason for books being published with lots of errors, because for every mistake the reader spots in any book, you can bet the proofreader has corrected many, possibly hundreds, it's just that messy manuscripts will have a higher frequency of these missed errors.

Traditionally, a book would go through several rounds of editing: copy-editing, typesetting, proofreading (sometimes by more than one proofreader) and proof collating. But these days, publishers must work to a very tight budget to produce the low-cost books for e-readers. This means cutting out a round (or two) of editing, so often, the proofreader is also wearing a copy-editor and formatting hat. So, not only is the book checked fewer times, but the person doing the checking is undertaking the job of two or three skilled professionals. When you're in copy-edit mode, it's harder to spot that missing quote mark, and when you're in proofreader mode, you might miss that a Renaissance man was looking at a painting by Monet. (Similar happened to me – I had found many issues with the timeline of the plot and corrected or queried them all... except for one. Never fear – the readers spotted it and celebrated their discovery in their reviews!)

There is also the issue that, once the proofreader has returned the manuscript, what happens to it after that is out of their hands. All the careful queries and suggestions may be totally ignored and some of the corrections may even be reversed.

Before I entered the editing profession, I too would have an apoplectic fit if I spotted one too many errors in a text. Now, it just saddens me when I see a negative comment in a review about the editing, and I feel sorry for the proofreader. I know how they take their work very seriously, as they are ever aware of the fact they are only as good as their last gig and that their next job depends on this one. A book that ends up on the shelf still full of howling errors is a culmination of many factors, not just the end-of-line proofreader.

So, if you do want to reach for your laptop to write a roasting critique of the quality of the editing, do please consider that there are more reasons for it being that way than just a rubbish proofreader. A 'could have done with another round of editing' avoids pointing the finger at one person and will make your point perfectly clear.