Do proof readers exist any more?

[stillcrazyafterall]

Not exactly a pedantic post but I know you will understand!

I read. A LOT. I am becoming more and more frustrated and disillusioned with the level of mistakes in books. Printed ones. By big companies. I read one the other week where 'she looked threw the window' I kid you not. I am currently reading ' A Foreign Country' by Charles Cumming. Excellent book, but I got annoyed when the main character 'racked his brains'. FFS this is happening in pretty much every book I read! I think I will start leaving reviews on Amazon and Good Reads with the glaring errors mentioned. Anyone else?

That van is jaw-dropping. We can only hope they are not so careless with their food storage. Actually, I think I would be checking.

I often wonder how signs at airports and stations etc get signed off when they are wrong. There is a sign for a 'Travolator' at Bank Station. I know that 'travelator' is a relatively recent coinage but surely its origin from 'travel' is evident? How did that come to be manufactured? Wouldn't several people have had to have seen it to sign it off?

At one London airport, can't remember which, there is a sign reading "Warning conveyor starting keep clear" with no exclamation marks or capital letters or line breaks to make sense of it. Wouldn't someone, somewhere, in the design and production process, have noticed?

@ErrolTheDragon

I'm not sure I agree about it being harder to proofread on a screen. For one thing there's spellcheck and grammar checkers which can help at the first level. But then if you find something like a homonym mistake you can search the whole document and check for other occurrences. I think there's less excuse for sloppiness nowadays.

I find it much harder. I can glance at a closely printed A4 sheet and home in on the one spelling mistake (fuck knows how, and usually to the intense irritation of the person showing me the sheet for other reasons). On screen, I have to read line by line like a normal human.

This is my all-time favourite truly lost in translation error. (The Welsh road sign with an out-of-office email on it.)

news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/7702913.stm

It’s much easier to copy edit, sub or proof on paper but it’s costlier and takes more time (posting it out and back again, taking in the changes), and most books are usually late, so screen it is.

Most magazines I used to work on have stopped having their own sub-editing team and instead the subs are “hubbed” and working across multiple titles rather than being expert on one. Publishers are still paying the same shit hour/day rates from years ago so most freelance subs/copy editors are moving on to digital nonsense like content design or literally anything else that’s better paid.

I’m currently working in-house for a marketing agency and part of my job still involves sub-editing, fact-checking and proofreading. And stuff still goes out with errors because after we’ve cleaned up copy, had it checked internally and externally, then had it typeset and designed, some numpty from the client rewrites it all on page at the last minute, or sticks their oar in going, “Oh, I prefer the US spelling/I hate semi-colons/those dashes look funny, let’s use hyphens/“which” just sounds nicer/“I was always taught…” and it all goes to shit but they’re paying, so we dance to their tune. Or as they’d have it, we prance too there choon.

Burritofan, I’ve been doing work for a client whose whizzy new in-house eproof system sometimes puts the correction in at the cursor, and sometimes puts it somewhere else in the text.

Frankly, I defy even the best sub to get a page out flawlessly under that system.

@MoreRainThanAnyYet Thanks, that’s going to haunt my dreams! Along with the designer I work with who absolutely hammers the keyboard when copying/pasting/saving using shortcuts, so you always have to hunt out rogue C/V/S from the text…

Errol, that’s dementedly brilliant!

I know just about enough Welsh, French, Italian, German etc to spot an out of office message. I hope.

Burritofan, I'm also an ex in-house magazine sub-editor and now edit mags and books from home. I know it's v annoying for people to find spelling mistakes but it's v easy to be an armchair critic when the reality on the ground is working fucking hard for crap money. I've been in the industry for 20 years and the freelance rate has stayed the same at most publishing houses.

At my last job I was solely responsible for 7+ mags (approx 64 pages each) per month. I almost had a nervous breakdown making sure there were NO spelling/factual/grammatical mistakes in any of them, while also batting away mad client copy amends.

Being a sub-editor/proofreader is like being a goalkeeper - you don't get credit for stuff you catch, but everyone is v happy to point out the things that slip through (and assume they could do better).

Yes they do, we use them.

No, I think they rely on word processing software. The BBC web site is a disaster area too, which is embarrassing because plenty of people learn English from the BBC.

Shame really. I used to proof read books while I was at college. It meant I could afford to eat & buy text books.

I'm with you, OP. One of my particular bugbears in magazines is "me and [him / her]" rather than "[he / she] and I".

For dyslexics (and I am one) uncorrected typos and poor grammar just make reading all that more difficult.

Actually, me and her is often correct. Depends on whether you need a subject or object pronoun. ('It was given to me and her' is correct but 'given to her and I' isn't, as sentence needs to make sense without the her). I'm sure you know that already and are referring to incorrect use, but I've lost count of the number of readers that write in about this and other misremembered grammar rules, thinking they are taking the intellectual high ground but get it completely wrong.

I understand the difference between object and subject. I was referring to me and her / him as the subject, not the object. It is also incorrect between the third person pronoun comes before the first person pronoun, eg she and I, not I and she.

Ok - really wasn't pulling you up on pronoun use!! Was making a separate point about armchair critics in general.

@13579db

I saw 'granddad' the other day in a book.

Surely it's 'grandad'?

"Granddad" is preferred in American English.

Graphs and everything
https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/23760/which-is-the-correct-spelling-granddad-or-grand-dad-or-grandad#23766

I'm a freelance writer - not for books, but for websites and blogs. The whole nature of publishing has changed enormously. Kindle books are often self-published and nobody is proofing content on a website before it goes live. So, so many errors out there.

It's my theory about why my DD's spelling and grammar is so poor - at her age I was reading Just 17 which wasn't exactly high literature but was at least proof read and edited before being printed. Now all the teens are reading is nonsense on Instagram and TikTok which is written by people who are barely literate themselves.

Depressing.

On Next website today, a "fit and flair" dress....

I agree, OP. It's disgracefully poor and exasperating in the extreme. I used to write a letter of complaint to the publisher, but I've given up now.

The organisation I work for (Policy & Comms) used to have an in-house proof reader. She was excellent and very good at her job. Since she left we've asked for someone else to take on the proofreading role and been told to 'proof read your own stuff.' It doesn't work like that though, it's extremely difficult to proof your own work properly. We try to proof each other's within the team but it is a skill in itself. It is a service that should be paid for so that it's done properly.

Also the communication that comes from my son's school is shocking. Always full of errors. These are the people teaching our children to read and write and they don't have the basic skills themselves. The headteacher's letters are the the worst. If I sent that kind of external communication I'd lose my job.

@Invisimamma

The organisation I work for (Policy & Comms) used to have an in-house proof reader. She was excellent and very good at her job. Since she left we've asked for someone else to take on the proofreading role and been told to 'proof read your own stuff.' It doesn't work like that though, it's extremely difficult to proof your own work properly. We try to proof each other's within the team but it is a skill in itself. It is a service that should be paid for so that it's done properly.

Also the communication that comes from my son's school is shocking. Always full of errors. These are the people teaching our children to read and write and they don't have the basic skills themselves. The headteacher's letters are the the worst. If I sent that kind of external communication I'd lose my job.

Agree about school letters. The one that made me chuckle was from the headmaster talking about how Covid homeschooling had been a 'steep learning curb'.

We had an email from school only today,

“Children must bring there water bottles….”

I am a freelance editor working mostly in the area of science communication, though I used to do far more work in the humanities subjects for academic publishers. I shall never forget an incident from decades ago where I applied for a job as an editor/proofreader at the Radio Times. I didn’t even get an interview. But what infuriates me is that from that time onwards the Radio Times has been littered with basic errors. It continues to this day. Clearly their biggest mistake was not employing me and it’s been a slippery slope ever since. 🧐

Kindle books are dreadful for it, (in need of good proof readers, but also good editors), but I think it's pretty inexcusable in printed books from established imprints, and yet ... here we are. Penny pinching, false economy.