Proofing 101: Designers Are Proofing It for Themselves

Proofing 101 reviews simple tips for streamlining your pattern writing and editing processes. Read the intro post for why this is a useful skill even if you’re paying a tech editor.

I am a firm believer that the more people who can proof a document/pattern/blog post before it goes public, the better.  But what happens when there really isn’t anyone else available? Or maybe someone else has edited the pattern but you just want to take one last look for yourself before pushing it live.

The problem most people run into when proofing their own work is that the longer you work on a project, the harder it becomes to see your own mistakes.  I’ve found this is especially true when I’m working on something that’s been through multiple edits already – sometimes I miss errors because I “remember” fixing them when maybe I just made a written note that never got inserted in the document (or, back when I worked at a job with a very old shared server, sometimes I did fix it and it didn’t save properly).  But mostly, once I’ve edited something three or four times, my eyes aren’t always seeing what’s actually on the page, they are seeing what my brain knows is *supposed* to be there.

There’s really no way to prevent this temporary editing burnout, so it’s important to recognize when it’s starting to happen. For me the tell tale sign that I’m no longer at full editing capacity is finding myself reading the same section or paragraph over and over again. It’s as if my brain has even lost the ability to say “no errors here, let’s move on.” 

But the pattern still has to get edited, and possibly on a deadline. So now what?

Take a break. Step away from the draft for even just a few minutes and go do something that doesn’t involve reading. Have a quick chat with someone in your house (or office), pet your cat, water your plants, make yourself a fresh cup of coffee or tea.  If you aren’t facing an immediate deadline and can leave the draft overnight while you do other work, even better.

Use a different format. When I was editing a 12 page newsletter that often included extremely technical scientific information and a lot of medical jargon, the most effective thing I could do to catch those last few typos was to stop editing on screen and to print the full color newsletter in black and white. If you are an edit on paper person, try looking through it on the screen, or copy and paste the text from the formatted version into a plain text word processing document so you’re only looking at the text (you can print this version if you really can’t edit on a screen). Changing what the document looks like helps you really see the text again.

Read it aloud. Reading text aloud is a great way to find punctuation errors in particular, but much like the above, the difference in format can also help your brain catch errors by hearing the words and not just seeing them.  Editors (including tech editors) are increasingly using the various text to speech features available on most major word processors to hear documents read to them.  In tech editing, some of my colleagues use this to catch punctuation errors (the reader is programmed to pause at a comma or period so if everything runs together, something is probably missing). Others use it when checking whether a stitch chart matches the written version of those instructions, so they don’t have to move their eyes back and forth between the chart and text and potentially skip over something.  Search “text to speech feature for [your word processing software]” if you aren’t sure whether you have this feature.  There are also free and low cost apps that can perform this service.

Trust yourself and know when to stop. This is a hard one, especially if you are really anxious about catching every mistake before publishing.  (And as a writer myself, I know sometimes it’s easy to hide behind “just one more proofreading pass” when you’re nervous about submitting or publishing your work.) But you can’t proof forever; at some point you need to trust that it’s as perfect as it is going to get.

(How to deal with mistakes after publishing is a post all on its own, we’ll tackle that later.) 

Do you have a favorite technique to help you keep proofing when your eyes start to glaze over? Have you used any of the above strategies? How well did they work for you?