Don’t shoot the panda: proofreading at work

At the museum, I’m the resident proofreader. Exhibit labels, brochures, what have you, I’m the one who goes through it with a red pen and gets rid of the sentences without verbs, the misspellings, the commas that are everywhere except where they should be, and the apostrophes, oh the apostrophes, misused all over. I try my best. I’ve got my reference books to check myself when I’m not sure, a like-minded grammar-nut I can email for a corroborating opinion. When it’s something really important (exhibit labels, for instance, that will be hanging where the public can see them for years), I go over it three, four times, trying to catch everything I can.

I’m never going to catch everything, though. No matter how vigilant I am, something — and usually something obvious — slips through. Looking over the same material so many times, I think my mind automatically corrects things, every now and then, and my eyes glide right over the error. Or I just didn’t know something, or I was careless in the nanosecond I was looking at it. Whatever the reason, I’m going to miss something, and that drives me crazy, and I confess not least because I always get called on it. There were 200 labels in our last exhibit, each with a paragraph or two of text. I proofed those things five, six times, because this was a REALLY important long-term exhibit. I agonized over commas and phrasing and repeated words. I tried my best. And after the exhibit opened, did I hear, “Wow, you proofed those all by yourself? Amazing job. Really lovely language flow. Great punctuation.” No, of course not. What I heard was, “There’s a double period in that one label over in section 3.5. At the end of a sentence? You missed that.”

I get defensive, frustrated, angry. Fed up. I can’t help it. And I think my response is justified because the obvious flaw in all of this is that I shouldn’t be the one doing all the proofreading. There should be at least one other person checking everything, along with me. What they say about a second pair of eyes? Absolutely true. I read an article in The New Yorker recently, an interview with copy editor Mary Norris. Ms. Norris describes the workflow at TNY, where every OK-er has a backup person to check them. Every article is seen by multiple eyes. That’s how it should be! Obviously the museum isn’t The New Yorker, but the principle should be the same. We’re a very small staff, however. There just isn’t anyone else, at least not anyone else with any proficiency at all regarding grammar, punctuation, or the English language in general. I’m not being conceited when I say that: whatever my many failings are, it’s an openly agreed-upon truth in my workplace that no one else can reliably proofread. We’ve tried, in the past. The people who were best at it missed everything, skimmed too quickly. The ones who were the worst added incorrect corrections. So it’s a tad infuriating when the colleague I had to gently school regarding the difference between “your” and “you’re” last week is pointing out my failures.

Call this my mini-rant on proofreading, I guess. I do enjoy doing it, though I’m sure you can’t tell from this post. I like cleaning things up, making them better. Making a sentence flow more cleanly. Defending the apostrophe whenever and wherever I can. When I read Eats, Shoots & Leaves, I felt I’d found a kindred spirit. Lynne Truss tells a story about the film “Two Weeks Notice”. It drove her crazy that the apostrophe was missing. (For the great unwashed, it should have been “Two Weeks’ Notice”.) It drove me crazy too. I didn’t stand outside a theatre with a cut-out apostrophe on a stick, as Truss did, but I wanted to. It was a relief to know I wasn’t alone in my punctuation obsession. I’m not complaining about the work. I’m complaining about the lack of grammar geek company for backup, and to keep me from creating a cut-out apostrophe for an entirely different purpose.