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

[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).