Proofing 101: Efficiency Isn’t the Goal
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.
Some years ago at a former job, I was working with a new colleague to edit a report she was writing and discovered she had an unusual approach to proofreading. She scheduled a meeting with me, ostensibly to talk through some questions she had about the project, but her agenda for the meeting was solely reading out to me the sentences she was unsure about in whatever section she was working on that week and asking for my edits on the fly. When she asked for another meeting for the next section of the document, I knew I had to say something.
"I'm sorry," I said, "could you send me the entire document when you are ready for edits? It's tricky to do this in real time without the full document for context."
"Oh!" she said, "I thought it would be more efficient to just talk about the places where I had questions – but sure, I’ll send it."
When I received the document, I was so glad I spoke up when I did. There were several large factual errors in that first section we had edited “together” – because she didn't realize they were errors and I couldn’t correct them because she had not read them out to me. There were also inconsistencies in the language she used from section to section (using two different names to describe the same program, for example), that could only be corrected because I had the whole document available to me. If we had continued with her “efficient” way of proofing, the final result would have been riddled with errors that were easily avoidable.
The experience helped me articulate my editing and proofreading mantra : In proofreading, you don't want to be efficient, you want to be holistic.
“But,” I hear you saying, “what about the Find and Replace tool? And boilerplate text? What are those if not ways to be more efficient?”
Those tools, while they may aid in cutting down the number of errors you find in a proofreading pass, they aren’t and shouldn’t be a replacement for sitting down with a full document in front of you and slowly going through the text yourself to make sure the entire document works as a complete and consistent piece, whether it’s a knitting pattern, an essay, or a blog post.
So what should you look for if you are taking a holistic proofreading approach to a knitting pattern?
In places where technical terms or proper names are used, are you using the same terminology throughout the document? For example, don’t refer to the end of your sleeve as a “cuff” in one part of the pattern and the “wristband” elsewhere.
Does the romance/introduction to the pattern describe the actual pattern you are knitting? Does the sample you will be photographing match the intro AND the pattern? This sometimes happens when designers write the romance while not quite done with the pattern and then end up changing their mind about the finishing techniques, or eliminating a feature they put on their original sample. I once knit a baby cardigan where the photo and description indicated there were adorable pockets that were not actually included in the final pattern write up – and I didn’t realize it until I’d already knit the entire cardigan.
Is the tone consistent throughout? Tone can be harder to gauge in a list of instructions like a knitting pattern than an essay or blog post, but as an example let’s say for the body piece of a pattern you give a lot of detailed instructions:
“Cast on X stitches using the Long-Tailed Cast On then start with Row 3 of Stitch Pattern A as detailed on page 2 through the following rows”
But then for the sleeve, the instructions begin:
“Cast on X. Continue in A for below rows.”
Both these instructions are technically correct, but if you accustom your audience to expect very detailed instructions and then remove those details, they may feel a little like the training wheels have been pulled off without warning. SImilarly if you start with few details and then suddenly get very detailed in a later section, your audience may worry that they’ve done something wrong in the earlier sections since they didn’t know there was a preferred cast on method, or that they should start from a specific row of the pattern.
All three of these aspects of a knitting pattern can only really be checked if you look at the entire pattern at once, and it does take some practice to do on your own. However, if your first proofing pass identifies inconsistencies in these areas, you can always ask your tech editor or another friendly pair of eyes to take a look specifically for these issues. (In a future post, we’ll discuss tips for catching errors when you are the only editor available.)
Does reframing proofing as a holistic process give you new ideas for issues to look for in your written work? Have you ever made a correction in your work that you wouldn’t have caught unless you were looking at the entire piece?