At age 13 I read the proofs of my dad’s first book (Designing the Communication Experiment by John Waite Bowers). The original meaning of “proofreading” was the necessary step of closely reading proof pages from the printer, since errors might have occurred when the author’s manuscript was transferred to type at a print shop for publishing. This was the author’s last chance to fix anything before hundreds or thousands of copies of the book rolled off the presses.
I earned a penny for each error that I found in dad’s proofs, but I got a bonus payment of a nickel for identifying a chart that had its X and Y axes reversed. Maybe that positive reinforcement was why I learned to enjoy proofreading.
In my experience, many authors are not good proofreaders of their own work. This becomes a serious problem for somebody who is self-publishing. Get somebody to read it for you before you go to final formatting. You may be blind to your own errors.
When Nobody’s Wife was published, I wasn’t given the chance to proofread before the book went to press. It has some mortifying errors in it. One of the worst is that the word “Foreword” was misspelled “Forward.” It turns out there must be a lot of people who don’t know the difference between those two words, because I’ve seen that same mistake in books several times since then.
In college I worked a couple of semesters at Windhover Press, setting type by hand and proofreading when a book was ready to be printed. We proofread in pairs, backward. One person read aloud from the author’s manuscript while the other person read the proofed pages, but we read the words in reverse, from end to beginning. It’s tedious but it’s a good technique, because reading forward, your mind and eye will skip over errors and fill them in mentally. Reading backward, it is impossible to attach meaning to the words and so you notice them for what they are, artifacts of ink on a page.
I recently proofed the final draft of a book for a friend who is self-publishing. I like closely reading another author’s work; I learn about variations in writing voice and styles. The reading-backward technique is not feasible when solo proofing, because you will fail to notice sentences that are missing words or have words in the wrong order. I adapted a little bit by reading some of the pages from the bottom paragraph to the top, so that I would not fall into the reading trance.
Proofreading is not the same thing as editing. In my mind, a proofreader should only mark real errors, and that means skipping past places where a sentence could have been phrased more clearly or another word would have been a better choice. But in proofreading for a friend, I might find it irresistible to mark the worst of those with suggested revisions. That’s just being helpful, right?