Things My Friend Missed While Proofreading

One of the hardest things about proofreading is that, while you’re looking at commas, a misspelling can slip by. While you’re looking for misspellings, you can overlook some numbers that don’t add up. While you’re focused on math, you miss that a guy quoted in the 20th paragraph of an article as “Wilson” has not yet been introduced with a full name and title. While you’re focused on the quotation attributions, a clunky or illogical sentence can slip by. While you’re focused on logic and sentence flow, erroneous prepositions or articles like “at to” or “in at” or “a the” can get by. And so it goes.

 

This stuff is on my mind because I’m teaching a friend copy editing and I’m finding interesting the things she misses. I should note that not only is she smart and highly literate, she’s more literate than me. By just about any measure -- past school achievement, number of books read, mastery of foreign languages -- she’s ahead of me. So it says something that, while our recent focus has been on commas, hyphens, and badly written sentences, she’s overlooked some doozy errors in the copy she’s been practicing on.

 

Here are some things she missed. They might seem obvious to you. But in a four-page article loaded with a million little pitfalls couched in passages that sometimes had to be completely rewritten, these aren’t as easy to catch.

 

1. “After a day of pouring over the shoe, handbag, and cosmetics selections, you’re ready for some serious refreshment at P.J. Fakename’s Bar & Grill at Caesars Palace.”

 

2. “SkyJump Las Vegas is a heart-pounding, pulse-racing, high-speed thrill ride that will leave you with the kind of adrenalin high only a day at the spa can reverse.”

 

3. “Prawn dumplings and venison sausage on sweet corn pancakes are two of the tray-passed hors d’oeuvres offered by Joe’s Catering that make for exciting cocktail fare appealing to every palette and dietary choice—spicy, gluten-free, vegetarian, or omnivore.”

 

4. “While cocktail receptions are generally more informal and relaxed than seated dinners, you don’t need to forego glamour.”

 

5. “A photo booth complete with props like feather boas or a life-sized Easter bunny is a playful twist on traditional photography, says event photographer Ann Onymous.”

 

Here are the errors my friend missed: 1. “pouring” should be “poring.” 2. “adrenalin” should be “adrenaline.” 3. “palette” should be “palate.”  4. “forego” should be “forgo.” 5. my favorite: “a life-sized Easter bunny”? Does that mean it’s the size of the real, live Easter Bunny? (If so, I have some sad news for our writer.) Or did the writer mean it’s the size of a live rabbit, which seems not worth mentioning at all? My friend should have either questioned it or changed it to “oversized,” “large,” or something like that.

 

If you found other problems with these sentences -- especially if you saw ways to rewrite them better -- you were probably right. And that just further bolsters the point: catching errors can be really tough.

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