It can be painful to admit, but all proofreaders miss things at times – even me(!). Some errors can slip through especially easily. Here are my top five.
Because our eyes get used to the typeface and size most text is set in, when we come to text with different formatting we need to be particularly careful. Bold or italics can affect spacing between letters, which can cause our eyes to skip missing letters more readily (especially narrow characters like ‘i’, ‘l’ and ‘t’ – which we should be careful with even in normal text!).
Anything in all caps requires close attention, too. One proofreading catch I once made sounds simple to spot: it was in
90-point-size type (not an exaggeration!) on the front cover. But the fact it was in all caps, perhaps, is what had led to no one noticing that the second ‘i’ was missing from the word ‘sustainability’. Even after I caught it, I went over the word a couple more times to make sure my eyes weren’t playing tricks on me.
A common related error is when some text is formatted and a character right next to it that’s supposed to be formatted normally has got ‘caught up’ in the ‘special’ formatting. If you notice bold or italics, always make sure there’s nothing else bolded or italicised that’s not meant to be.
Homophones are words that sound the same but have different meanings. Sometimes they’ll have identical spellings, such as the noun ‘rose’ (a flower) and the verb ‘rose’ (the past tense of ‘rise’); sometimes they’ll have different spellings, such as the verbs ‘sew’ (working on fabric with a needle and thread) and ‘sow’ (planting seeds in the ground). It’s important as proofreaders to be alert to these and to develop a sense of when to check things. We all know many of these sorts of words without having to think about it, but there are more obscure ones we’re less likely to come across often, so never be afraid to check your dictionary if you come across a non-everyday word.
A word break is a word that won’t fit on the end of a line, so is broken over the end of one line and the start of the next, with a hyphen marking the break. A line break is simply the end of one line and the start of the next. Both can be hazardous to the proofreader!
Is the word break in the best place? We should sound out these words and avoid having a break in the middle of a syllable, so if we have ‘allow-ed’ as a word break, we have a problem: better to break it as ‘al-lowed’ (or, even better in this particular example, to see if we can save some space on the first line to take the whole lot back). Typos in these words can be easy to miss, too: we can get distracted by the need to check the word break and miss a spelling error.
Similarly, line breaks are perilous. Our brain can temporarily go into autopilot and race ahead to to the start of the next line, causing us to miss something at the end of this one. And while it’s always easy to miss when a short word has been duplicated (re-read the previous sentence if you didn’t spot it), it’s especially easy to miss when that duplication happens at the end of one line and the start of the next.
Often, page numbers and running headers can ‘jump around’ a bit. One check I run at the start of each proofreading job is to go over them all at once. I take a transparent plastic ruler and lean it against my monitor, lined up to the element I’m checking on the first page of the PDF, then use the arrows on my keyboard to click through each page in turn. This acts like a flick-book animation: if on one or two pages the page number or header is a millimetre or two higher or lower, or further left or right than on the surrounding pages, it’ll jump around as I click through, and I can add a note to the typesetter. You’re almost certainly not going to spot this if you only look at each running header on its own when you get to a new page, so it pays to take a little time checking this at the start of the job.
Finally, even the best proofreaders among us have, at times, missed a typo because it came right after something more eye-catching or that required a touch more thought than ‘that’s the wrong letter, I’ll correct it’. If you spot an error, double-check the word or two before and after it as well!
