Don't
Smother Your Book in the Crib...Proofread!by Ronald L. Donaghe
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"Uncorrected Prepublication
Galleys"
So my expectations are that I will see typos, misspellings, off-kilter paragraphs (lack of indentation, for example), unclosed quotations—any number of things. Yet I suspend my judgment, because I know that such errors will be corrected before the book is sent to bookstores for sale. Sometimes, however, one can still find mistakes in traditionally published books. A perfect copy, free of all errors, is actually rare. But with print-on-demand books, where there is no true editorial process, the likelihood for mistakes is higher. And it is up to the writer to do a thorough proofread of the galleys received from the publisher prior to allowing the book to be printed and sold.
Even without a team of proofreaders, a careful writer should be able to eliminate most errors so that a 200 page book might have only a handful of errors. So when I read a POD book and find typos on almost every page, or even on every fifth page, I do not suspend my judgment. I hold the writer responsible for lack of professionalism, carelessness, and sometimes downright laziness. I wonder why the writer even bothers to slave and revise and agonize over a story to make it a good one if he/she is not going to bother proofing the final manuscript.
Here are some of the typos, misspellings, and such that I have found in my own work—prior to publication. So I am on the lookout for them before I allow a book to be printed and sold.
Be conscious when you're proofreading
1. The use of one spelling of a word when I mean another spelling. Actually, the words mean different things, but in my initial writing I type the wrong spelling. A spell-check program is not going to catch these words, either:
"and" instead of "an"
"hear" instead of "here"
"their" instead of "they're" or "there"
You get the picture. There are dozens of such words to watch out for, and the simpler the word and spelling the more likely you might be to let them pass without catching them.
2. Forgetting to close a quotation. This occurs (for me) most frequently when I allow my characters to engage in very long speeches, or when two or more characters engage in multiple exchanges that take up at least a page of text.
3. Using a single quotation mark when I should have used a double quotation mark—or vice versa.
The comma controversy
1. Over-use of commas. I am guilty. So I have to consider each comma that I use and decide if it is necessary to the way I intend the sentence to be read and where I want the emphasis. I still use a comma before "and" in a list of at least three items. To delete such commas is to write in accepted newspaper style. However, I prefer to almost always use the comma because of lists that contain compound items: "on the camping trip, I took ham and eggs, bow and arrows, and musical CDs." Okay, that was a really bad example, but you understand what I mean.
I now avoid using commas between prepositional phrases, except at the beginning of a sentence where the prepositional phrase is perhaps out of syntactic order, as in this example: "In the courtroom, the witness appeared nervous and disingenuous, so his testimony lacked credibility." I want "nervous and disingenuous" to occur as close to "testimony" as possible, so I chose to place the prepositional phrase first. This placement also implies that the witness might not have appeared nervous outside of the courtroom.
2. Misuse of commas when periods are correct. If you use too many short, periodic sentences, you might have a tendency to use commas between two independent clauses. "He felt a burning sensation, his hair was on fire." To subjugate one clause to another, you could make it into a complex sentence with a qualifier. "He felt a burning sensation, because his hair was on fire."
Don't allow yourself the luxury of automatic proofing tools
I suggest turning off auto-correct when you do a close spell check. Or at least don't allow yourself to "replace all" when your spell check program finds a word it doesn't like. And if you can, don't keep auto-correct on when you are working on your last careful revision. I did, and the word-processing program provided me with this nasty little surprise: I had intended one of my characters to say, "G'night, Will." And either in the spell check phase or using auto-correct, my word processing program changed that to: "Gunfight, Will." Luckily I caught this error on my final run through.
Stupid mistakes
One avid reader of Zane Grey (I'm too lazy to check on the spelling of his last name) once said that in one scene the character was firing at pursuers with a Winchester rifle and in the very next paragraph, he put away his six-shooter. I once had a cool breeze blowing through the window at the beginning of the paragraph and it became warm air at the end. I caught that one. I just finished reading a book where the character was eating an ice cream sandwich on one page and was toying with his hot fudge sundae on the next page. Some books have two Chapter Fourteens (I just made up the chapter number). In my fantasy novel, Cinátis, in one draft, one of my characters was naked, and yet when he went into an alehouse, he reached into his pants for coins. I caught that mistake, as well, before the book was published. My point is that typographical errors, mistakes, misspellings, plot inconsistencies, and just about any other problem is going to occur when you’re writing a hundred-thousand-word novel. So at least be conscious when you’re revising and proofing; don’t turn the mistake-catching over to an auto-correct feature in your word processor; spend as much time on the last chapter proofreading as you do the first chapter.
Be afraid—be very afraid
Still some things get through with even the most careful editing. It is always best to have a fresh set of eyes go through your manuscript. But if you do not have an extra set of eyes, it is your SACRED responsibility to make sure that your book goes out into the world with as few errors as possible. If you don't, you will turn off readers; and by word of mouth or in reviews, your work will soon have the reputation of being full of errors. You will in effect smother your book in the crib, and it will not live into a long shelf-life.