Proofreading is ridiculously simple. And you’re terrible at it.
During an annual corporate kickoff — in front of an audience of senior executives and over 400 sales professionals — a single word appeared on the theatre screen. The word was “exellence.”
Do you see it?
The presentation was built by a team of communications aces — read and proofread dozens of times — and somehow, they misspelled the only word on the screen. Of course, the beautiful irony is the word itself.
A candidate vying for a proposal writing job once touted his experience, “copyrighting, editing, and proofreading materials.” Again, a delightful irony, assuming he really meant to champion his skill writing copy as opposed to his ability to facilitate the legal protection of works of authorship.
In both instances, flawed copy, written and proofread by professionals, made it through to become a final, embarrassing product. It really raises the question, “are they just bad at their jobs?”
Actually, they aren’t, which makes both scenarios a bit perplexing. I consider myself to be a strong proofreader, but truthfully, as I sat in the audience and experienced the “exellence” error, it felt like a battle against my brain to accept that the word was spelled wrong.
As it turns out, our brains are really not wired for proofreading. In his New York Times bestselling book, Thinking, Fast and Slow, noted psychologist Daniel Kahneman gives us some clues as to why we’re terrible at proofreading.
According to Kahneman’s research, the brain has two different thought systems he refers to simply as System 1 and System 2. System 1 is characterized as being fast and automatic. It helps us quickly understand simple sentences such as text on a billboard while driving down the highway. The strength of System 1 is that it saves us an enormous amount of time and energy.
System 2, on the other hand, is slow, logical and calculating. It can help you dig into your memory, reason between complex options, and count the number of A’s in a certain piece of text.
System 2 sounds like a proofreader’s best friend, but System 1 has the wheel most of the time and is notorious for simplifying scenarios and failing to observe the law of probabilities. It’s likely to decide that since it hasn’t noticed any errors during a cursory glance, a piece of text is error-free — especially for elements we commonly gloss over, for instance, the spine of a book.
Kelly Dickson, an editor and proofreader with Emond Publishing suffered a System 1 failure early in her career. Her System 1 was happy to disregard details to keep things moving along during a proofing assignment for a college-level textbook entitled, Public Administration. Her error: the letter “L” was missing from the word “Public” on the spine of the book, giving the impression of a wildly different reading experience and making her keenly aware of that particular word for the rest of her career.
So if our brains aren’t wired to care and it takes a significant amount of energy to produce error-free copy, does precision really matter? We live in a world of texting acronyms and apologetic email footers blaming auto-correct for our unusual word choices. Perhaps we should direct our energies elsewhere and bow to biological determinism.
Before you wave the white flag and surrender to popular cacography, consider this: According to grammarcheck.net, 72% of employment recruiters discard CVs as a result of seeing one or more spelling mistakes. If you project the word “exellence” onto a screen in front of 400 executives, you can be sure that you’ve undermined everything that follows. So yes, it matters.
The first step toward proofreading perfection is to admit that you have a problem. The problem is how your brain works. It’s far more concerned with conserving energy and keeping you alive than caring about the difference between there, and their, and they’re. Everyone has the same struggle, so accept it and move on. The trick is to decide, during any writing assignment, that you’ve almost certainly made spelling and grammatical errors. It’s important to shout down your overly confident System 1 and engage in a logical and thoughtful, System 2 search-and-correct mission.
Since humans aren’t designed for proofreading, you might think it’s time to let computers take over the task. Spellchecking software has been available for many years, and many applications will also check for simple grammatical errors. As I write this article, Evernote is being very helpful by identifying my grammar and spelling mistakes (although its accuracy with grammar is sketchy).
Thanks to the growth of machine-learning and artificial intelligence (AI), San Francisco-based company Grammarly (www.grammarly.com) now offers an AI-powered spelling-and grammar-checking app that helps users produce error-free copy. It would seem that the time of the machine has come (at least for proofreading).
“Not so fast,” says Toronto-based freelance writer and editor, Margaret Henderson. Electronic tools are great for catching simple mistakes but have no capacity for preserving the tone and grammatical idiosyncrasies of individual authors. Rules are rules in writing, but rules are also made to be broken. Until machines can make allowance for voice, the copy they edit runs the risk of being sanitized and homogenized. Even Grammarly offers human proofreaders as a premium service for when, “you’re pressed for time and need to make sure your writing is mistake-free.”
For proofreading excellence, Henderson suggests using a highly-complex yet abundantly available tool: your finger. It’s literally as easy as pointing at each word. And, since the days of her very “public” (with an “L”) humiliation, Dickson has been partial to using a coloured ruler under each line of text to focus her attention. Both simple techniques isolate words from the meaning of the text and help the proofreader focus and engage a System 2 logical process to ensure each word is correct.
Kahneman writes that System 2 is all about mental effort and self-control. So much effort, in fact, that it generates a physical response. When a person is focused and engaged in a task their pupils grow larger. During his research, Kahneman could see when a person gave up working on a problem by simply looking into their eyes. And giving up is exactly what our brains prefer. System 2 is often lazy and more than happy to cave into System 1 unless you make the effort as easy as possible.
For complex documents, Henderson recommends using a spreadsheet to track easy-to-miss bits of copy like running headers and footers, the table of contents, and cover copy. Removing distractions, creating structure, and allocating attention favours System 2. So, think about your environment and the time of day to figure out when you’re at your obnoxiously, most nit-picky System 2 best.
Top two pieces of advice from both editors: Don’t proofread (or operate heavy machinery) when you’re tired and don’t try to proofread something you’ve just written. Find a proofreading buddy or put some space between the writing and the proofreading. You need to be detached from the content to keep your brain from bypassing the mistakes. Otherwise, you’re sure to prove true this wise internet meme:
“I do my best proofreading after I hit send.”
