While I was employed as a corporate & securities paralegal, I proofed many a merger agreement, prospectus, and contract. I saw this (I forget where) many years ago & kept a copy taped above my desk: *************************** The Perfect Book By William Keddie The Foulis’s editions of classical works were much praised by scholars and collectors in the nineteenth century. The celebrated Glasgow publishers once attempted to issue a book which should be a perfect specimen of typographical accuracy. Every precaution was taken to secure the desired result. Six experienced proof-readers were employed, who devoted hours to the reading of each page; and after it was thought to be perfect, it was posted up in the hall of the university, with a notification that a reward of fifty pounds would be paid to any person who could discover an error. Each page was suffered to remain two weeks in the place where it had been posted, before the work was printed, and the printers thought that they had attained the object for which they had been striving. When the work was issued, it was discovered that several errors had been committed, one of which was in the first line of the first page. => As found in A Passion for Books, by Harold Rabinowitz and Rob Kaplan.
In undergrad, I took a course in proofreading w/ a former Chicago Tribune copy editor. She had us read the page backwards -- start at the bottom right word and move left and up, word by word (not reading the words backwards, but the page backwards). It breaks the mind out of its expectations. Also, if there was time, she had us go through each word and strike through each letter with a pencil to make us focus on the letters instead of the words. Later, I worked as a copy editor for a magazine and those two habits gave me pretty good results.
5 comments:
Ruh Roh!
I proofread daily, at Gutenberg, and it's amazing how the brain edits out typos. We just read right past them.
While I was employed as a corporate & securities paralegal, I proofed many a merger agreement, prospectus, and contract. I saw this (I forget where) many years ago & kept a copy taped above my desk:
***************************
The Perfect Book
By William Keddie
The Foulis’s editions of classical works were much praised by scholars and collectors in the nineteenth century. The celebrated Glasgow publishers once attempted to issue a book which should be a perfect specimen of typographical accuracy. Every precaution was taken to secure the desired result. Six experienced proof-readers were employed, who devoted hours to the reading of each page; and after it was thought to be perfect, it was posted up in the hall of the university, with a notification that a reward of fifty pounds would be paid to any person who could discover an error. Each page was suffered to remain two weeks in the place where it had been posted, before the work was printed, and the printers thought that they had attained the object for which they had been striving. When the work was issued, it was discovered that several errors had been committed, one of which was in the first line of the first page.
=> As found in A Passion for Books, by Harold Rabinowitz and Rob Kaplan.
In undergrad, I took a course in proofreading w/ a former Chicago Tribune copy editor. She had us read the page backwards -- start at the bottom right word and move left and up, word by word (not reading the words backwards, but the page backwards). It breaks the mind out of its expectations. Also, if there was time, she had us go through each word and strike through each letter with a pencil to make us focus on the letters instead of the words. Later, I worked as a copy editor for a magazine and those two habits gave me pretty good results.
Funny!
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