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Sunday, October 9th, 2005 11:13 pm
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.
Monday, October 10th, 2005 05:52 pm (UTC)
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. :-(