Warning: This article is about reading distressing and intense material, so it refers to some examples.
I was reading about someone dying in a hospice. I suddenly realised I had just said something like: ‘Does this mean they had cancer and Parkinson’s? Then the comma should be here, and not there.’ It felt extremely callous that my reaction to that level of suffering was to comment on the punctuation.
But that was my job, and a proofreader needs to be clear what their job consists of. It might help the writer if I had also expressed some empathy with the people involved. But it wouldn’t have made it a better book.
Maybe you need a certain kind of mind to be a proofreader. A few years ago I read about campaigns against Coca Cola, whose factories in arid areas used so much water that local villages ran dry. I was seeing a lot of typographical errors, and although these didn’t detract from the points the book made, they gave it a less professional feel. My reaction was not just to want to stop my friends drinking coke, but to contact the author and offer to proofread his next piece. I did feel strongly about what that author was saying, which was why I then wanted him to get his message across better. I wanted to help.
It does take a coolness and objectivity to react to written material in this way, especially if the mistakes are minor or technical. I was reading an account of Barack Obama commenting, as President, on a mass shooting in the USA. It is truly awful that a mass shooting can become, as he said, a ‘routine’ part of a President’s job. But I also noticed that the punctuation was inconsistent, and there was a capital letter where there shouldn’t be one. And what the author needed from me at that point was not the shock she expected from her other readers, but the technical focus to say how to correct it.
The most extreme example of this, perhaps, came after I had seen a TV programme about Treblinka, a Nazi concentration camp, where more people were murdered than in almost any other camp. The programme was a lengthy interview with one of the last survivors of the camp, and I could not look away. He talked eloquently and powerfully about his experiences, both at Treblinka and afterwards. I imagine most people would be silenced into sombre reflection by what they saw and heard on that documentary. I know I was.
When the programme finished I went online to find out more, and came to the website of the Treblinka Museum, in Poland. The English pages are clearly not written by a native English speaker, and are full of mistakes. My mood changed from the solemn awareness of the evil of the Holocaust, to a focused desire to correct mistakes on a page. ‘This is an important place – it should be promoting itself clearly and professionally.’
It doesn’t mean I don’t care. It means I am professional. When I was working on a book about human trafficking, I read that someone had been ‘bought’ for £40.00, but the next page referred to it as £40. Well, I thought, if you’re going to educate people about the appalling international trade in human beings, then I am going to help you to keep your units consistent.
So if you have written something shocking, or upsetting, or simply highly personal, then a proofreader who can work on it objectively is what you need. If I see a sentence referring to ‘the nature of human existence, life and death, and the ultimate destiny of human beings’, I am not going to be in awe of the subject matter; I am going to ask, should there be a comma after ‘death’?
Accuracy Works 