Experience Is King When It Comes to Proofreading and Copyediting

Proofreader, proof reading, copyeditor, copy editing . . . many people associate these words with what I was taught to do as a child.

My mother, born in Oklahoma and raised in California, was fascinated by the differences in use of English language. Though she never received her high school diploma because a war-effort job needed her the week before graduation, she excelled in the use of English, and there are several churches dotting the USA landscape whose pastors and congregations were grateful for her correspondence- and newsletter-editing skill. Her pasttimes included reading dictionaries and other word books and, of course, doing crossword and other word puzzles. She spent much of our lives together pointing out the incongruities of English usage, such as "he opened the window and threw-up the sash" in The Night Before Christmas. So I grew up aware of the humorous foibles of grammatical goofs.

To make matters worse—or better, actually—for me, she married a man whose mother was a school principal and English teacher. She was also the family matriarch, and coming from the old school, where the belief that what we do reflects on everyone in our families, she would tolerate no grammatical slip-up or slang. 

To that mix, add an English teacher in my senior year in high school who believed that logic should accompany the ability to diagram a sentence, andthat should bring you to the realization that I never had a chance to be anything other than what I am. Well, of course, I could be anything I wanted to be, but English language skills would always haunt me.  I cannot sit down and read a mystery or romance —or any other novel, let alone web page, magazine, or newspaper, etc.—without seeing the errors of usage or spelling or just typos in the text. However,  I refrain from writing to the authors and telling them they need a proofreader or copyeditor on their writing team.

By the grace of God I refrain.

I learned some time ago that no one is perfect, so I assume that writers of published works have proofreaders or copyeditors on their writing teams.  If they're attempting to make money or want to be taken seriously, it'd be suicidal not to. And I know that anything published through traditional publishing houses have been "gone over" by in-house editors—which, of course, tends to jerk my chain when I find errors. But, again, I know that no one is perfect.

So each time I find a work cluttered with errors, I redouble my efforts to leave as few behind as possible for my own clients. Now you might think that would be easier to do in business than other writing, but it's not. Deadlines still loom and people still put off till the last minute what they should have done last week. And a testament to the need is that some people have been "let go" when it was discovered they used an independent contractor to edit their work. I therefore caution my potential clients to run the idea by their bosses and demand a contract from the editor that includes a confidentiality clause. This protects the writer, the copyeditor, and the business.

Anyway, after 20 years as a medical transcriptionist, where proofreading and accuracy are vital—if not critical—to the quality of care patients receive and where confidentiality is demanded and constant typing breeds carpal-tunnel syndrome, I switched focus to just proofreading and editing. That allowed me to continue using my language strengths but made it much easier to find time to rest the wrists.

No, I don't have a college degree, though I took college prep English courses and earned very high marks on both the SAT and ACT in English. I opted to marry and work in the insurance field before migrating into the medical field. I didn't need a degree to be a medical transcriptionist. However, I did take language courses to master base words, prefixes, suffixes and the like. 

A lot of people put a lot of stock in a degree, and in some areas, they are very helpful.  On the other hand, I have turned down degreed English teachers who wanted me to refer clients to them. 

"Why?" you might ask. "Are you jealous because they have a degree and you don't?" 

No. Don't be silly. Jealousy doesn't build business! It doesn't bring in clients. It doesn't keep clients happy who need someone when I'm not available!

I turned them down because their e-mails to me, their applications, and their test edits proved once again that how you apply what you know (out here in the real world) is more important than any piece of paper saying you attended and managed to pass the proper classes. Classroom learning can't hold a candle to experience, because nobody pays you based on how well you do in class. You can do as much or as little work as you wish to "get by".

My work ethic won't allow me to adopt a "this isn't the big city" attitude, which many professors and instructors adopt when teaching at any but the "big city" universities.  My upbringing won't allow me to adopt a "nobody will notice" attitude, which many internet marketers and business people in all but the largest companies adopt. My mother and my grandmother always noticed! And since I discovered that God notices everything  . . .

If you write for profit or the serious communication of ideas, take the time to send a sample of your project—the same sample from the center of your project—to each of several proofreaders and copyeditors. Make them give you a free estimate and sample of their editing styles on  your project. Then you can compare all the samples and estimates you receive and choose the right proofreading and copyediting service for your needs.

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