Quick Signs Your Proofreader is No Good
Part of the problem
with successfully hiring someone is that you pretty much need to understand
their job to figure out if they’re good at it. Writers only catch proofreaders’
negligence when they see something they know is wrong.
So what do you do
if you’re not too familiar with grammar, spelling, and punctuation? Isn’t that
what you hired them for?
With freelancers
these days, literally anyone can become an editor, and many times it’s the
people who don’t realize how little they know that have the confidence to put
up their website. Just recently, as I shopped around for potential editors, I
read through a webpage that was disgusting with errors. Previously, I spoke of
a writer who believed his book was worth 25 dollars because he had been
“professionally edited” by a school teacher. Over the course of six months he
went from singing her praises to bitching about having to postpone his deadline
to fix errors. Worse is when you get some nutcase who has unfounded quirky
opinions on the way things should be done.
Not only is having a poor proofreader a waste of
money; it can damage the work you’ve done.
So how does someone who
can’t double check the editor’s work know that they’re not getting the best
help they can?
“Author,” “editor,” and genres are not capitalized,
save for some legal documents.
This is perhaps the
most common error I see on the sites of freelance editors and small presses. To
be fair, I’ve sometimes seen it in places like big time agents. However, a
primary goal in getting a proofreader is to know you can trust them when you’re
in doubt. If their job is to fix errors, their webpage should be an example of
their precision and knowledge.
There are some
exceptions, like standards in contracts, and of course if they consider it a
title to something, like in a blog post. But if it’s in their mission statement
or ‘About’ section, they should not be telling you, “I’m an Author and Editor
specializing in Science Fiction and Fantasy.”
“Young Adult” and
“New Adult,” may be capitalized because of the tendency to abbreviate, but
overall, if you see this on the front page in a quick blurb they have to sell
their proofreading skills, you might consider passing.
Punctuation goes inside the quotation marks.
I’ve seen this
growing more and more in online material, (Buzzfeed and the like), but a
fiction proofreader should know better than anyone that in most cases,
punctuation goes inside the quotes, not after.
“Go away,” he said.
There are some creative
reasons why you might choose otherwise—for instance, you’ll often see me put
question marks outside of the quote if the quote itself was not supposed to
have a questioning inflection.
“Do you really
think that he’ll change his mind after saying, ‘I’m not going to prom with
you’?”
So you may decide
to give them the benefit of the doubt if you understand why they chose to go
against the standard, but if it seems just like a generic, standard sentence,
commas go inside the quotes.
They don’t have any professional credits.
It’s not an end
all. Sometimes this might be desirable because they’ll charge less to get
going. But if they’re starting with no experience to date, it’s possible (and
common) that they actually don’t know grammar as well as they think. It’s
suspicious that someone believes they can do something without having viewable
rationale of why they’re good at it.
But more to the
point, even for those who do have a comprehensive knowledge of proofreading
might not understand the standards in the industry. Like the English teacher
above, some people will get bizarre ideas like “it’s” isn’t a conjunction for
“it has.” Pedantic criticism can be
problematic in fiction.
Comma use.
Learning about the
appropriate use of commas is difficult, especially because there is some room
for creativity and play. The importance of commas is typically clarity, and
sometimes it’s actually more useful to leave a correct one out than to clutter
the sentence in creative writing. Plus, even the technically correct usage
requires a certain amount of understanding of grammar to know when to apply it.
If you don’t know
where commas should go, you can still read through the content on the
proofreader’s site and ask yourself about its legibility. One ‘editor’ I just
looked at had very clunky and confusing sentences, many of them brought on by
missing subtle punctuation. Excessive use of them will also become distracting,
even to an untrained eye.
Look for the obvious.
It shocks me the
number of writers I see allowing themselves to get burned by freelance editors
and indie presses who are obviously not skilled in their field. A quick look at
their website can often bring out a whole slew of issues that no one could
miss. Obviously, if they don’t care about the precision and professionalism of
their own website, you can’t count on them doing a good job on your giant
manuscript.
If you liked this post, want to support, contact, stalk, or argue with me, please consider...
Liking Charley Daveler on Facebook
Following What's Worse than Was
