I have been given much reason today to think of how important the people are that help writers and musicians put together their work. I don\’t think there are many people that give a thought to the people that go through and look for typos or grammatical errors, or the people that alter a pitch, lower something in the mix or tidy up something that is overly busy. Everyone needs another set of eyes to check out their work or they may end up in trouble: trouble manifesting as a badly presented piece of work. A particular bug-bear for me is the mis-use of the word an — it goes before words with a vowel sound or an h and no one seems to know how to use it. It is great to include phrases from the vernacular sometimes but you need to choose carefully or your work can end up looking sloppy and unprofessional. A lot of magazines will have a style sheet to tell you how they edit a particular type of work but if they don\’t then go by your standard grammatical rules and you can\’t go too far wrong. No one has an excuse for spelling mistakes these days what with all the spell-checkers in word processors and even in-browser dictionaries. Take a bit more time and put a bit of effort into your enterprise and it will pay dividends.
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March 1, 2008 at 8:23 pmHi, hope you don’t mind my stopping by, but your title caught my eye on the main page. Anything doing with the subject of proofreading and editing is sure to make me want to see what others have to say.
I found it awfully refreshing to read something positive about these important partners; they are often ranted against. I am an amateur proofreader, always striving to get better.
Oh, and don’t trust the spell-checkers; they don’t know it all either. lol
Thanks for the great post!