THE BOOK--Playing The Percentages In Baseball

My wife works as an editor, so I am well aware the difficulties of proofreading.  As such, I have only once complained once about an error in a book: when a sportswriter’s collection of essays on his favorite sports memories included an essay about his emotional attachment to the “David Ramirez” led Red Sox of 2004.

amen, tom. having just edited our 160 page draft guide all by myself, as well as every single article on our site all alone, it is very annoying when people say “you misspelled jeff francouer.” walk a mile in our shoes....

I find proofreading/editing fun, *shrug*

Just curious if your guys run some kind of automatic spellchecker and grammer checker similiar to the won Microsoft Word has.  Or if you guys are hand editing - or some combanation of the too? 
vr, Xei

We did all the work in MS Word, including the index and table of contents, spell and grammer checker, etc.

And then converted to Adobe PDF.

There is a difference between the occasional typo and “they’ll figure it out.” Perfection is impossible, but competent proofreading is a sign of respect for the reader. Definitely worth a couple of WAR. Tango, if you ever have something you want proofed, I assume you can see my e-mail address there. Unbeatable rates, literally.

Right, and I’m suggesting that the reader should give the benefit of the doubt.  The reflex to be annoyed at typos should be held in check.

Indeed, there was one passage in The Book where the publisher completely mangled it.  It had nothing to do with us as writers.  We wrote it right, and they cut/pasted it or whatever, wrong.  That’s another thing: don’t presume that it’s the writer that needs help from the editor; in some cases, it’s the opposite.

Thanks for the offer!

I also love proofreading and would be very happy to help out should you publish again.

"emotional attachment to the “David Ramirez” led Red Sox of 2004. “

Don’t you think this is an intentional portmanteau of David Ortiz and Manny Ramirez?

I proofread a scientific journal and it’s pretty tough. Not only do I try to track down typos, I frequently end up rewriting big passages because most of the authors are non-native english speakers.

Crowd-proof it?

Make a password protected bit of the site, toss up the chapters on there, have your biggest fans read a chapter each (or whatever) and be allowed to mark any mistakes they find in a wiki-format or whatnot.

More eyes = Less mistakes = Fewer headaches

And I think we all know that most of them would end up buying the book anyway, or you would have to charge far more for the same amount of proofreading than you would for their share of book revenues if they didn’t buy it.

I proofread my manuscripts very carefully, using various methods—not just reading word by word but also reading aloud, searching for common errors, etc.

But once something has been published I don’t dare read it, because I just KNOW I’m going to see an error somewhere.

Yes, there are two things that help me in the proofreading:

1 - read it aloud, as you mentioned

2 - print it out; basically, seeing the words in a different context forces you to read it a different way; this one to me was a big help

Reading the sentences in reverse order (last word first) also lets you pick out spelling/usage errors because your brain doesn’t ‘expect’ the right usage/spelling to be there.

RE: Tango/7, you are soooooooo right about typos being EDITED INTO otherwise flawless pieces.  It is perhaps my single biggest peeve as a writer.

Ed, there was even a recent piece where I said that Chavez played for the Expos, and then the piece came out that Chavez played for the Nationals.  I was shocked, especially because I’ve been so vocal on my blog about keeping the two separate.

The editor explained that he changed Expos to Expos/Nationals (which is technically true… he played 7 games for the Nats).  And then some other editor shortened it to Nationals.  I caught the mistake, and they fixed it pronto.