You think you hate proofreading now!

by Kris Neri with the Femmes Fatales

I’ll admit it — when I see bad grammar and punctuation online, such as in a Facebook post or a comment to a news story, I long to take a red pen to it on my own laptop screen.

Yes, I am part of the Grammar Police Force — correct and serve.

I teach a lot of online classes for the Writers’ Program of the UCLA Extension School and various Sisters in Crime chapters. My assessment of a class begins with the students’ introductions. When I see clear writing that generally follows standard punctuation and grammar and spelling by most of the class members, I assume that’s going to be a good, hardworking class that will make strong progress.

When I see broad range of poor language skills, I assume that most of the class won’t work as hard as they need to if they’re going to make it to publication.

That might sound unfair, but it’s almost always been true. They still get my best, but I often won’t get theirs.Now, I’m not talking about mistakes. We all make them. I know I sometimes go too fast and make flubs. When I catch my own, I cringe. I’m talking about the people who don’t cringe. Those who write run-on sentences with no punctuation, or capital letters, or strange punctuation that makes no sense; the people who continually confuse “your” and “you’re,” or “there,” “they’re,” and “their,” or “it’s” and “its.”

I struggle with how much grammatical instruction I should provide. I’m hired to teach novel planning, character development, and other topics, along with general craft building. When that’s done well, it’s a difficult enough job, albeit a satisfying one. I haven’t been hired to teach remedial English.

I’ve finally come down on the side of writing general remarks to the entire class, rather than singling out any one offender. I figured that it was enough to give a gentle collective nudge. Sometimes that’s worked. I’ve had students apologize for letting their own standards slip, vow to improve, even to the extent of sharing which grammar books they’ve purchased, or which online sites they’re using to improve their skills.

To my surprise, I’ve also had other students argue with me about how unimportant grammatical standards
are. One student taking one of my classes, who was a school teacher herself, once told me, “That stuff doesn’t matter anymore.”

Really? I believe it still matters to the futures of young students being educated in our schools — including her students — but I can also tell you it also matters in publishing. If you don’t have enough personal pride to care about the quality of the work you’re presenting, you should be practical enough to realize it will matter to the decision-maker reading it.

I’ve recently had a new novel accepted for publication — Hopscotch Life, featuring quirky protagonist, Plum Tardy. Knowing that I’ll soon receive my editorial letter and be expected to make my novel sharper than it might be now, followed by copy-editing, to make it as grammatically pristine as possible, I thought I might share some of what an author faces, so that the newer writers reading this will know what they’ll be expected to do once their work is accepted for publication:

During the writing of your novel, of course, you’ve made your storyline as tight as it can be, answering all story questions, making sure every thread has a payoff, and especially, eliminating any potholes. And then, you’ll get into the serious proofreading. Only after you’ve made that manuscript as clear as possible do you send it off to your agent or editor. Keep in mind that the quality of the work as a whole is often being judged by the grammar. If it’s unreadable, they’re not even going to try plowing through it.

At some point, most likely, you’ll get good news about your novel. Then, sometime thereafter, you’ll receive your editorial letter. 

That’s when the surprises come. That funny line that you were so happy with and which you thought was so well delivered? Well, the intelligent person editing your novel doesn’t get it. That haunting passage you believed every reviewer would quote? She thinks it’s overwritten. On and on it goes. Questions about aspects you believed worked perfectly keep coming. 

On the purely language level, you learn that despite your earlier proofreading efforts, you’re told there are missing words that you didn’t pick up on because your mind just filled that word in during your reading, and extra words your mind just skipped over. And as for the prose — don’t kid yourself; there will be some awkward phrasing.

So, you perfect the storyline again. If you’re lucky it won’t require too much rewriting. Whether it does or not, at some point you’ll come back to proofing and making sure your grammatical standards reach an excellent level. 

Only, despite your efforts, it’s still not perfect. Close, maybe, but not completely, absolutely flawless. After that rewritten manuscript that you’ve proofed until you blind yourself, you’ll get more chances to find more flubs. There will be page proofs and the galley to read.

It gets ever harder to proof your own work because you become too increasingly familiar with it to see anything wrong. I try reading from the end, line-by-line backwards. And still, the occasional flub finds its way in. Thankfully, there’s a copy-editor available to catch them. 

Finally, the book goes to the print, and eventually, it’s released into the world. And you know what? Any errors that you missed will jump out at your reader, who brings fresh eyes to it. And that reader is going to write to you — and sometimes the reading world — about any mistakes she finds in your novel. 

That’s ultimately why grammatical, punctuation, spelling, and style standards matter — because they matter to that reader and/or reviewer.

Do you really want readers saying that you didn’t care enough to make your writing as clean and memorable as it could be?

How about you readers…are you the grammar police, too? Or do you think I’m making too much of nothing. Writers, what are some of your proofreading tricks?

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Comments

[Susan Neace]

Early in my practice the circuit judge I was most often arguing before had been a teacher prior to attending law school. He corrected bad grammar in legal pleadings with a red pen. He told me he once received a brief in a case that was so bad he sent it back to the lawyer to be rewritten.
I sure hope I caught all the mistakes in this text before you get it.

[Mark]

I know I look horrible online. I just don’t see any errors no matter how carefully I reread in something I’ve just written. I need an hour before I can edit myself at a minimum.

And I will never get it’s and its. I’ve tried. Really I have.

So I’m forgiving of the occasional slip up, even in published novels. But I have read some things that were so bad they were unreadable. Heck, I have several run ins with a reviewer whose grammar was so bad it was painful it looked something. Like this. No really it did.

Words and in browser editors catch so much now there really is no excuse if you care. I’ll admit it took me too many years to care enough to go back and edit my reviews before posting, however.

But let’s not get into the errors added by auto correct for those of us using our phones.

[krisneri]

LOL, Susan! A man after my own heart!

[krisneri]

Mark, I think you're being too hard on yourself. Your writings always look good. You are right about autocorrect, though; when autocorrect makes some crazy substitution over and over, I want to believe there's someone in my computer just having fun with me. ;)

[catriona mcpherson]

I think it matters too! It makes me seethe to imagine that children aren't being given the option to choose a style: formal or informal; casual or fancy; idiolect or standard. It's never a bad idea to have more tools in the box.

Where I part ways with grammar police is when their views shade into a (pointless) requirement that language stops changing. I've recently decided to sit out all "pet peeve" discussions online, because I'm no fun and and I spoil it for people when they're trying to enjoy being outraged.

[krisneri]

Catriona, I agree 100%.