Proofreading: A Closer Look

I mentioned before that I am a slow proofreader, but a thorough one. It would be inaccurate to say that I am a good proofreader because I am a slow reader. There is much more to it.

The first part is that words are pictures. Sure, we make them out of letters, and they are oh so malleable, but ultimately, ever single word in our language is a picture with a distinct meaning. They are no different than the words in Chinese, each one with a distinct meaning and pronunciation. The only difference is that in English, the pictures are of maps (i.e. pronunciation). So when you come across a new word, the picture may help you understand how to pronounce it, but the word itself is still largely meaningless.

The point of this is that people can tell when a picture isn't right. In the movie Coming to America, there is a fast food chain called McDowell's. The logo is obviously ripping off McDonald's, but we can all tell that they are not the same golden arches we see on the street. Words act the same way to me. My brain has logged all of the common and most of the uncommon words in a massive catalogue. When a word passes by my eyes, I say it out loud, which means I have to access the catalogue and check what word I'm reading. If a word isn't in the catalogue, then I focus on it and determine if the word is a misspelling or if I screwed up in reading it.

For rarer words, or words that I have never seen before, I have to rely on my other abilities: etymology and Latin. These two skills largely go hand in hand. I have always been curious where words come from. Whenever I was curious, I would look up words in the dictionary to find out. Most times, it can be derived from Latin. I was also fortunate enough to have taken a few years of Latin in high school. My language comprehension is almost nil, but I still have a good amount of vocabulary. These let me break down words into their components to ascertain meaning.

For example, the word 'portable' can be broken up into 'port' and '-able'. 'Port' comes from the Latin portare, which means "to carry". Therefore, 'portable' means "able to be carried". This serves two purposes. For one thing, if I can break a word down into its components, I no longer need to know how a full word is spelled; I only need to know how to spell each component. For another thing, if I know where a word comes from and I know how to spell the root word, I will know how to spell variations of the word according to the rules of derivation and inflection.

My final tool is sheer memorization. This is moreso used for rules of punctuation than anything else. I like to play games. Part of playing games is learning the rules. So, to make sure I don't screw up, I have learned the rules of punctuation and usage of particular rules. Things like usage of commas and semicolons are not mysteries to me. Commas, of course, have the most rules because they have the most ways to be used, but if you look at them in a certain way, they all pretty much mean the same things (they either function as parentheses or as prepositional phrase separators). I admit that there are times where I couldn't rattle off a proper definition of a rule, but can tell you when it is and isn't appropriate to use.

Ultimately, I think that proofreading is a skill. Although you can learn a number of techniques and tricks to make yourself better at it, some people are just hardwired for it. If you are the kind of person who notices typos on signs in the grocery store or outside of a restaurant, even when you wish you could just ignore them, you are a natural proofreader. If you have ever been on the internet and haven't noticed that nobody can spell, then you are probably one of those people, and you should make sure to hire a good proofreader before you send out anything important.