Anal people, unite!

[cjsmith]

Saturday afternoon I took a short course titled "Become a Copyeditor or Proofreader." Amusing factoid: the guy who spoke to us is the person responsible for Hershey's Syrup spelling "recipe" correctly on their bottles. I knew there were rare other people who'd notice such a thing, but it was validating to meet a guy who writes to companies and gets such mistakes corrected!

As for my fellow students, I have never seen so much anal-retentiveness gathered in one room. Wow. I had found my tribe!

I was a little disappointed that no one there, including the speaker, could spell better than I could. :-)

I'm sure I could make a living at this if I spent a bit of time building up a resume and a portfolio. It won't pay what embedded OS work pays, of course, but if I went freelance it would be a fine supplemental job. I haven't yet decided to commit to it. I'm mulling it over.

Comments

Recipes

[fyellin.livejournal.com]

How do you misspell "recipe"?

Oops. I'm writing to someone who aspires to be an anal-retentive proofreader.

How does one misspell "recipe"?

Re: Recipes

[cjsmith.livejournal.com]

The syrup company had chosen "recipie" on its label. Oooops. :-)

[layer.livejournal.com]

none of us can spell. though i've gotten really good at recognizing if a word is spelled wrong, even if i can't figure out how to fix it.

[cjsmith.livejournal.com]

I think of myself as someone who can spell very well. In a room full of anal-retentive proto-editors, I figured SOMEONE would outclass me. Nope. Maybe I can spell very VERY well!

[jtidwell.livejournal.com]

Sometimes I think programming and proofreading require a similar degree of anal retentiveness. I wonder how many proofreaders might actually be kinda good at programming. :-)

I'm proofreading galleys for my book right now, and apparently I'm more picky than my publisher's "professionals." That's frustrating. You should see how heavily marked-up this manuscript is, even though it's already gone through their copyeditors!

One more point: a friend who's a professional proofreader says that for some people, including her, spelling and grammar mistakes practically leap out of the page. Almost like they were highlighted already. It happens to me too; she thinks people like us are just wired a little differently from the rest of the human race...

[lkeele.livejournal.com]

At the very least, they'd be good at debugging the code.

[cjsmith.livejournal.com]

I suspect you're right. Attention to detail is key for both professions.

a friend who's a professional proofreader says that for some people, including her, spelling and grammar mistakes practically leap out of the page. Almost like they were highlighted already.

Yes! That's exactly how I feel about it. I have always attributed that to my voracious reading. If I've seen a particular thing 50,000 times done correctly, and only twice have I seen it wrong, the wrong ones will jump out. I suspect it's harder to build that neural net today. Errors are much more common than they once were (at least in some forms of print).

[lkeele.livejournal.com]

Ooo, sounds fun! Did you thank the recipe guy? If it weren't for him, that would have been one more irritant in my life...

You and I should have a spell-off, though I'm sure you'd win. I think the hallmark of a good editor is her relationship with the dictionary... or is that just my relationship with American Heritage that we're talking about here?

[cjsmith.livejournal.com]

I didn't thank him. Perhaps I should have! :-)

We went through "The World's Hardest Spelling Test" -- several pages full of commonly-misspelled words. He asked us to imagine that this was the manuscript and we had five minutes before FedEx pick-up. The words were wonderful. Liquefy. Straitjacket. Shoo-in. Opthalmology. Gauge. Ibuprofen. He had once caught a newspaper headline with "ibuprophen" in it!

I'm sure you're right that the best editors use reference material very frequently. That's something I'd have to learn, actually; I usually trust myself.

[hitchhiker.livejournal.com]

Sounds like fun!

[cjsmith.livejournal.com]

It was! :-)

[quasigeostrophy.livejournal.com]

Bad spellers of the world, untie!

*gd&r* ;-)

[cjsmith.livejournal.com]

Not in THAT room, though! :-)

[mactavish.livejournal.com]

It's fun work, but after the dotcom crashiness, the expected wages plummeted. I quit because I couldn't make a living wage given how much time was spent marketing myself -- finding work, responding to queries, that sort of thing -- along with the time I could actually bill for my work, and the amount of work I could get when the glut of laid-off website copyeditors hit the freelance market. But now that the economy's picking up in general, there might be more work in both places. Having a course will help. Sunset magazine is usually hiring for their pool, which is very part-time and a good supplement for freelance work. If you're ever not working, you could check them out. (this post not proofread)

[cjsmith.livejournal.com]

I am not surprised that marketing yourself was a large chunk of your time spent. Did you ever go take the test for Editcetera's placement pool?

[runeshower.livejournal.com]

I got a good chuckle out of this post. Thanks!

[cjsmith.livejournal.com]

I was amused by it all, too! :-)

[psi-star-psi.livejournal.com]

I've sensed my spelling ability degrade after 20 years of spell-checkers. It's very frustrating. Most of the time I trigger that I don't trust the spelling, so I run it through the checker.

I also have that feeling of things leaping out of the page at me. It really grated on me that the spelling and grammar in the Merc (San Jose Mercury News for non-local readers) were noticeably worse during the month of September. I attribute it to the number of "Big Stories" at the time, so they were sloppy.

The Hershey's Syrup change is an impressive accomplishment. The person I would really like to congratulate is whoever managed to finally change the express lanes to "N items or fewer".

[cjsmith.livejournal.com]

If your spelling is pretty good, though, at least you'll have far fewer of the kinds of problems bad spellers have with spell checkers.

I bet you're right that the folks at the Merc were probably more rushed than usual in September and thus a bit more careless. It does make sense.

Want to hear something a bit scary? Some publishing houses are abandoning copyediting entirely. They're telling authors to go hire it done themselves if they want any. Needless to say, spelling and grammatical errors in novels and outright factual errors in textbooks are dramatically on the rise. :-(

[aleeceh.livejournal.com]

Copyediting is one of the things on my "this might be a good fit for me" list, because I, too, am one of those folks for whom spelling and grammatical errors tend to leap off the page—especially when I'm reading someone else's writing, less so when it's my 2nd or 3rd pass through the same article.

However, I have a love-hate relationship with deadlines. Without them, I can procrastinate indefinitely, so I really do need them to get anything done in a reasonable amount of time. But my stress level goes through the roof when I'm up against one. My 18 months editing the 24-page monthly magazine for our Porsche Club region with my husband strongly reinforced all of the above. Our end product was among the best the organization has seen, but it was killing us to get it out every month. We ultimately had to get out from under it before the term we had originally committed to was up, just to save our sanity. Of course, that was on top of working full time and juggling very busy social and relationship lives. Maybe it would be easier to tolerate if it were my primary job.

[cjsmith.livejournal.com]

I have a similar relationship with deadlines. Without them I procrastinate and with them I panic. I suspect you're right that if it were your primary job it would be easier to handle. Good copyediting takes *time*; it's very easy to forget that and try to squeeze it in between laundry and a late evening at work.

I think it's great that you spent that time editing the magazine! It's too bad you couldn't keep it going and stay sane. I wish more people who were naturally good at it would give it a go. After all, there's so much stuff clearly in need! :-)

[drdaly.livejournal.com]

My Dad was a copy editor for our local newspaper, so I was destined to a life of misspellings leaping off pages to distract me from content.

On the other hand, there are books with typos that carry on between printings. When I read and rediscover these errors, they seem like old friends. Were they corrected, I might even miss them.

I am fortunate in having a wife who shares my love of finding mistakes, even in our own conversations with each other. It keeps us both on our toes...

[cjsmith.livejournal.com]

Were they corrected, I might even miss them.

I have to chuckle at this! Some errors are like old friends, aren't they? :-)

I am fortunate in having a husband who is happy to have me glance over articles he writes. I get to feel useful.

[lesliepear.livejournal.com]

Embedded OS programming is very technical.
If you could proofread/edit perhaps you can look into technical writing/editing which might pay better.

Check this site out: http://www.stc.org/

[cjsmith.livejournal.com]

I have done technical editing of a sort before -- thanks for reminding me! I'd forgotten. I was mostly a fact-checker, making sure the manuscript was technically accurate.

[firecat]

Editing is pretty good freelance work. And as a programmer, you'll be in a good position to break into technical editing, which pays better than other editing.

You don't have to commit to it right away, because you can start doing it on the side.

I think spelling ability is genetic or otherwise hard-coded in the brain. I've always been a natural speller, but my dad, who is also a voracious reader, spells really badly.

[cjsmith.livejournal.com]

I didn't know technical editing would be any different in pay scale. Thanks for the idea!

That's an interesting concept (that spelling is hard-coded). It's hard for me to comprehend what the world *looks* like to someone who doesn't automatically spell very well. I look at me and I look at someone else and I guess that another usual difference (voracious reading) might be linked. But evidently that's not, or at least not always, the case.

Dang I make a lot of typos when drunk. I just thought I should mention that.