 A proofreader's guide to grammarSo, as promised in last week’s blog post, I’m going to start looking at some of the ‘tricksier’ aspects of English grammar and providing a proofreader’s perspective on usage and abusage. Before I start on the elements of grammar itself, I wanted to use this first post to explain what I mean by ‘a proofreader’s perspective’. Surely it makes no difference whether you’re the originator or proofreader of a sentence. Surely, the same rules apply. Strictly speaking, yes, the same rules apply. But there are qualitative decisions a writer makes with which a proofreader needn’t concern themselves. Remember, you’re a proofreader not an editor. You’re not asking yourself whether or not a sentence is good, you’re checking to make sure it’s correct. Let’s take a look at the semicolon (I’m going to be talking about this in more detail next week) to illustrate what I mean. So, a writer is trying to describe the moment in her novel when a particular character realises she has become invisible. She writes: Melissa couldn’t see herself in the mirror because she was invisible. She then deletes that sentence and writes: Melissa couldn’t see herself in the mirror. She was invisible. She then deletes that sentence and writes: Melissa couldn’t see herself in the mirror; she was invisible. Happy with this third permutation, she goes on to describe Melissa’s adventures in invisibility. None of these options is incorrect. The writer’s use of the semicolon in the third version is fine; the semicolon can be used in place of a conjunction. But you might have an opinion on which version is qualitatively better. Me, I like the second option. I think it has more punch. As a proofreader, my opinion on such matters isn’t relevant. I’ve got a job of work to do. I’m looking for errors. That’s what my client is paying me for. That’s what your client will be paying you for. If you’ve picked up The No-Nonsense Proofreading Course, followed its instruction and taken its advice, you’ll be charging your customer $35 per hour to find errors in their work. You might even be charging more if you’re proofreading in a niche area: science, medicine, law. You might have lots of clients and a stack of proofreading that’s going to keep you in new shoes and good food for the next three months. You haven’t got time to be getting into a discussion with a writer over whether or not a period would serve better than a semicolon in a particular instance. Don’t get me wrong, if your ambition is to become an editor, proofreading offers a very effective way in. In fact, Chapter 8 of The No-Nonsense Proofreading Course deals, in part, with that transition. But on this website, we really want to focus on how to proofread, how to become a proofreader and how to create and develop your proofreading career or business. Believe me, that’s more than enough to be getting on with. Let’s go back to our writer, and the adventures of the now invisible Melissa. Our writer types: Melissa raises a hand, holds it inches from her face and sees nothing. She deletes this and decides to go with: Melissa raises a hand to her face; and sees nothing. Now, as a proofreader, you have grounds to take issue. The writer has used a semicolon and a conjunction, which is redundant. You only need one or the other. So, put your red pen to work and mark it up. The writer might come back and say the usage was intentional, that she was trying to create a ‘beat’. That’s her call. In my opinion, a period would serve better in trying to achieve that effect: Melissa raises a hand to her face. And sees nothing. But it’s her call.
The fact remains, you were right to draw attention to this inaccurate use of a semicolon. You were doing your job as a proofreader and you were doing it well. In a nutshell, as a proofreader you’re concerned with wrong and right, not good-better-best. So, that’s what I mean when I say I’ll be looking at grammar usage and abusage from a proofreader’s perspective. See you next time, when I’ll be looking at that little winking-eye emoji in a little more depth. Until then, Mike
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 How to Get Your Proofreading Business Online and Start Making Money.So, you’ve bought the book, got the t-shirt and now you’re ready to put your new-found and hard-earned skills from The No-Nonsense Proofreading Course to good use. Well stick around and you’ll discover how you how you can save a ton of time and money getting your proofreading business online, even if you’re an online newbie - and much faster than you think! Throughout your journey, you’ll have no doubt pondered the following:
Well, in short, yes you can, and this short series of articles is where you’ll find everything you need to create, promote and have a successful online proofreading business. Apart from the tips and ideas included in Mike’s No-Nonsense Proofreading Course (Chapter 9 ‘The Business of Proofreading’) and in his blog, you’ll discover every idea I can think of to help you on your way to becoming a self-employed (paid!) proofreader. Because this is an important and wide-ranging topic, I’ll break it down into bite-sized chunks which we’ll explore in much greater detail in further posts, which hopefully you won’t find overwhelming. But first things first… Where to start… Step 1. Sign up with every online freelance marketplace you can find. Step 2. Create a website. Step 3. Sign up with every appropriate social media channel. Step 4. Write, post and blog like crazy! Fair Warning! Step one will definitely help, but the real juice is in steps two, three and four! OK, let’s cover step one because it won’t hurt. Signing up with as many online freelance job sites as you can is a great first step and is probably the most cost-effective method of promoting yourself as a proofreader. Doing so will give you some very important online exposure, but once that’s done then what? Well despite being a great first step, you’re likely to be one of many proofreaders trying to shine in what can often be a very crowded marketplace. In the No-Nonsense Proofreading Course, Mike includes a comprehensive list of freelance marketing websites where you can register your proofreading business for free. Whilst this first step may well be cost-effective and worthwhile, it’s unlikely to bring you paid work as a freelance proofreader in a hurry, so my advice for what it’s worth, is to get to Step 2 as soon as you can and set up your own website to promote your own online proofreading business. If you’re tech and web savvy and have a website already, then you’ll already be familiar with the benefits of having your own website. However, if you’re new to creating and operating a website and are a little daunted at the prospect, then don’t worry, there are numerous low-cost or cost-free simple website-building solutions that are perfect for the online novice.  The benefits of having your own website The obvious benefit of having your own website is that you’re in complete control of how you communicate with your target audience to sell your products or proofreading services, and rather than hunting down paid proofreading opportunities, you’ll massively increase the chances of those proofreading jobs coming looking for you! Your own website is where you can blog to your heart's content (content marketing), build your own list of subscribers (email marketing) and provide a shop window for your proofreading business (to actually make money proofreading). In addition to showcasing your online proofreading business, having your own website provides you with the perfect destination to direct and refer all of your social media posts, and by including the same social media links on your site, make all of you content available to share onward. The perfect win-win. So, how do you promote your online Proofreading Business? It goes without saying that, regardless of the skills, the product(s) or the service you’re offering, unless your potential customers know about you, your path to success is likely to be a long and frustrating one. With that in mind, we’ll focus on one of the most important elements of your new proofreading business: Marketing, or more specifically, digital marketing. Like any business, unless it’s actively promoted, it’s likely to wither and die, so promoting your proofreading services regularly is key to your online success. Over the next short series of articles, we’ll delve in and look at how and where you can promote your proofreading business.  Through your own Marketing Channels…
Organic Search Engines…
Social Media…
Write, post and blog like crazy! Adding relevant content as often as you can to your website will keep it alive and relevant in the eyes of the search engines. This is called content marketing and getting this right will elevate your website up the organic search listings. This article is content marketing and apart from being very effective for search engine optimization (SEO), it can also play a big part in your social media strategy, in that you can post snippets or tantalising hooks to attract visitors to your site. So, to summarise; Yes, you can have a successful proofreading business, and creating and promoting your business online is key to achieving that. Coming soon… Step 1: Sign up with every online freelance marketplace you can find. Bye for now. Jeff  The No-Nonsense Proofreading Course in 2020 We’re almost three weeks into 2020, so I thought I’d better tell you what we have planned for The No-Nonsense Proofreading Course website over the next 49 weeks.
First off, we’re planning to post more proofreading exercises. A lot more. It’s one of the main reasons people visit our proofreading course website, after all. We’re also going to provide a lot more grammar instruction. Now, I always make the point that The No-Nonsense Proofreading Course doesn’t contain any grammar instruction. Why? Because there’s plenty of grammar instruction available free online. I mean, seriously, there are some fantastic free resources out there. Just Google ‘grammar instruction’ and you’ll be presented with a long list of brilliant websites (there’s Grammar Girl’s ‘Quick and Dirty Tips’ just for starters). So why would we incorporate grammar instruction into our proofreading course, necessitating an increase in price? The whole point of The No-Nonsense Proofreading Course is to present you with an affordable proofreading course, with the focus being on proofreading method and how to set up and promote your own proofreading business so you can make some money. All that being said, there’s no reason we can’t add to the pool of grammar advice. I mean, you’re already here on the website, so you might as well find out how to use a semicolon properly while you’re here, right? So, there will be more grammar instruction, probably focusing on those tricky aspects of grammar that trip people up all the time. But more importantly than that, we’re going to be giving you a whole heap of guidance on how to set up and promote your proofreading business. To that end, I’d like to introduce you to Jeff Fullerton. Introducing Jeff Fullerton Now I’ve known Jeff for over 16 years. We worked together at Shop Direct, the UK’s biggest online and mail-order retailer. We worked in the publishing department of the business, producing (and, in my case, proofreading) literally thousands of pages every year. When I first started looking at the idea of creating The No-Nonsense Proofreading Course, it was to Jeff I turned for marketing advice as I knew he’d already dipped his toe into the online marketing stream and had already had significant success with a couple of websites. As a result, Jeff and I became business partners. Jeff has always been there in the background, developing and promoting the website and taking advantage of online marketing opportunities. In 2020, Jeff will be in the background no longer. He’ll be sharing his extensive knowledge of online marketing and business promotion to help you (hand-in-hand with The No-Nonsense Proofreading Course) create and grow your proofreading business. So, Jeff and I will be splitting blog-writing duties. I will be writing posts on the subject of proofreading, providing you with tips and proofreading exercises. Jeff will be posting on the subject of website creation, content marketing and general business advice. Together, our ambition is to create the go-to online resource for anyone and everyone who wants to not only learn how to proofread but how to make money proofreading, whether as the owner of their own proofreading business, in full-time employment as a proofreader or as a lucrative side-hustle. So, that’s it: 2020 in a nutshell for The No-Nonsense Proofreading Course.
But that’s not all. We’ve got a few other irons in the fire, but we’ll talk about those nearer the time. Suffice to say, we have some very exciting plans for the next twelve months! We’re confident that this is going to be a great year for The No-Nonsense Proofreading Course. And, with our help, this can be the year you launch your own proofreading business or career. Until next time, Mike  Welcome to this week’s Proofreading Roundup, in a week when rabid raccoons prowled the streets of Manhattan, an oil leak in the Solomon Islands threatened the world’s largest raised coral atoll, and former mob boss Carmine 'The Snake' Persico died at the age of 85.
This week’s weird words. A proofreader without a vast vocabulary is at a considerable disadvantage. So, every week we’ll be introducing you to some of the more unusual words to grace the English language.
This week’s tricky words. Even exemplary proofreaders have their little blind spots. The No-Nonsense Proofreading Course provides a comprehensive list of the tricky words that can trip up even the most experienced proofreader. Here are just three of them:
This week’s proofreading exercise. From The Cosmic Computer by H. Beam Piper. Thirty minutes to Litchfield. Conn Maxwell, at the armor-glass front of the observation deck, watched the landscape rush out of the horizen and vanish beneath the ship, ten thousand feet down. He thought he knew how an hourglass must feel with the sand slowly draining out. It had been six months to Litchfield when the Mizar lifted out of La Plata Spaceport and he watched Terra dwindle away. It had been two months to Litchfield when he boarded the City of Asgard at the port of the same name on Odin. It had been two hours to Litchfield when the Countess Dorothy rose from the airship dock at Storisende. He had had all that time, and now it was gone, and he was still unprepared for what he must face at home. Thirty minutes to Litchfield. The words echoed in his mind as though he had spoken them aloud, and then, realizing that he never addressed himself as sir, he turned. It was the first mate. He had a clipboard in his hand, and he was wearing a Terran Federation Space Navy uniform of forty years, or about a dozen regulation-changes, ago. Once Conn had taken that sort of thing for granted. Now it was obtruding upon him everywhere. "Thirty minutes to Litchfield, sir," the first officer repeated, and gave him the clipboard to check the luggage list. Valises, two; trunks, two; microbook case, one. The last item fanned a small flicker of anger, not at any person, not even at himself, but at the whole infernal situation. He nodded. "That's everything. Not many passengers left aboard, are there?" "You're the only one, first class, sir. About forty farm laborers on the lower deck." He dismissed them as mere cargo. "Litchfield's the end of the run." "I know. I was born there." The mate looked again at his name on the list and grinned. "You're Rodney Maxwell's son. Your father's been giving us a lot of freight lately. I guess I don't have to tell you about Litchfield." "Maybe you do. I've been away for six years. Tell me, are they having labor trouble now." "Labor trouble?" The mate was surprised. "You mean with the farm-tramps? Ten of them for every job, if you call that trouble." "Well, I noticed you have steel gratings over the gangway heads to the lower deck, and all your crewmen are armed. Not just pistols, either." "Oh. That's on account of pirates." "Pirates?" Conn echoed. "Well, I guess you'd call them that. A gang'll come aboard, dressed like farm-tramps; they'll have tommy guns and sawed-off shotguns in their bindles. When the ship's airborn and out of reach of help, they'll break out their guns and take her. Usually kill all the crew and passengers. They don't like to leave live witnesses," the mate said. "You heard about the Harriet Barne, didn't you?" Errors:
You may have paused over the word “bindle”. A bindle is the bag-and-stick combination often seen in stereotypical depictions of migrant workers or homeless vagrants. If you have any comments, I'd love to hear them. You can leave them below. I hope to see you back here, next week, for another Proofreading Course Weekly Roundup. If you’re considering a career in proofreading, you might want to consider my great-value proofreading course. Click here for details.  Welcome to this week’s Proofreading Roundup, in a week when a streaming-service movie won the Best Director Oscar at the Academy Awards, the disturbing online phenomena (and moral panic) of Momo hit the headlines, and the World Bridge Federation suspended Geir Helgemo after he failed a random drug test.
This week’s weird words A proofreader without a vast vocabulary is at a considerable disadvantage. So, every week we’ll be introducing you to some of the more unusual words to grace the English language.
This week’s tricky words Even exemplary proofreaders have their little blind spots. The No-Nonsense Proofreading Course provides a comprehensive list of the tricky words that can trip up even the most experienced proofreader. Here are just three of them:
This week’s proofreading exercise From Seller of the Sky by Dave Dryfoos. "It's winter, my boy. We'd freeze." "You've said it's pretty in winter! You took the money for the certificate." "I suppose you'll grow away from your parents soon anyhow; I suppose you have to.... Get your warmest clothes and meet me at emergency exit four." My grandfather talked it over with his sister Annie and of course they didn't have any warm clothes, but they'd heard so often from Old Arch about the cold that they put on two sets of tights apiece, and two pairs of socks, and then they hunted for the emergency exit. They'd never been there before. They didn't know anyone who had. The signs pointing to it were all worn and defaced. And it was a long way to go. After a while Annie began to hang back. "How do we know the exit will work?" she asked. "And how will we get back in if we ever do get out?" "You don't have to come," my grandfather said. "But you'll have to find your own way home from here." "I'll bet I could," she said. "But I'm not going to. I don't think Old Arch will even be at the exit." But he was. He looked at them carefully to see how they were dressed. "You mean trouble for me, girl," he told Annie. "They'll think I took you along to make love to." She had just reached that betwixt and between stage where she was beginning to look like a woman but didn't yet think like one. "Pooh!" she said. "I can run faster and hit harder than you can, Arch. You don't worry me a bit." Old Arch sighed and led them through the lock. They stepped out into a raging snowstorm, which soon draped a cloak of invisibility over them. Neither my grandfather nor Annie had ever smelled fresh air before. It threatened to make them drunk. Their nostrils tingled and their eyes misted over and they’re breath steamed up like bathwater. For the first time in their lives, they shivered. When the City was out of sight in the storm, they stopped for a moment in the ankle-deep snow and just listened. They held their breaths and heard silence for the first time in their lives. Old Arch reached down and picked up some soft snow and threw it at them. They pelted him back, and then, because he was so old, attacked each other instead, shouting and throwing snowballs and running aimlessly. Old Arch soon checked them. "Don't get lost," he said. "We're walking downhill. Don't forget that. We're going into a draw where there are some trees." He coughed and drew his rags about him. "The city is up hill," he said. "If you keep walking around it, you'll find a way in." His tone was frightening. Annie clung to my grandfather and made him walk close to the old man. It was clear the old man didn't have enough clothes on. He staggered and leaned hard on my grand father. They kept moving down the slight grade. They saw no sky and little of anything else. The snow was like a miniature of the City's dome, except that this dome floated over them as they walked. Its edges were only about fifty yards off. "Where are the Outsiders?" my grandfather asked. "Aren't there people here?" "They're miles away," Arch told him. "And indoors. Only fools and youngsters are out in this blizzard." "Fool’s is right," Annie said tartly. "There was supposed to be sky. And there isn't." Errors:
If you have any comments, I'd love to hear them. You can leave them below. I hope to see you back here, next week, for another Proofreading Course Weekly Roundup. If you’re considering a career in proofreading, you might want to consider my great-value proofreading course. Click here for details.  Welcome to this week's Proofreading Course Roundup, in a week when Space X's Falcon 9 rocket endured "a rather spicy landing"; Samsung revealed their new foldable phone will cost "just" $1,980; and the first mammal, the Bramble Cay mosaic-tailed rat, was made extinct due to climate change.
This week’s weird words. A proofreader without a vast vocabulary is at a considerable disadvantage. So, every week we’ll be introducing you to some of the more unusual words to grace the English language.
This week’s tricky words. Even exemplary proofreaders have their little blind spots. The No-Nonsense Proofreading Course provides a comprehensive list of the tricky words that can trip up even the most experienced proofreader. Here are just three of them:
This week’s proofreading exercise. From The Earth Quarter by Damon Knight. The sun had set half an hour before. Now, from the window of Laszlo Cudyk's garret, he could see how the alien city shone frost-blue against the black sky; the tall hive-shapes that no man would have built, glowing with their own light. Nearer, the slender drunken shafts of lamp posts marched toward him down the street, each with its prosaic yellow globe. Between them and all around, the darkness had gathered; darkness in angular shapes, the geometry of squallor. Cudyk liked this view, for at night the blackness of the Earth Quarter seemed to merge with the black sky, as if one were a minor extension of the other—a fist of space held down to the surface of the planet. He could feel, then, that he was not alone, not isolated and forgotten; that some connection still existed across all the light-years of the galaxy between him and what he had lost. And, again, the view depressed him; for at night the city seemed to press in upon the Quarter like the walls of a prison. The Quarter: sixteen square blocks, about the size of those of an Earth city, two thousand three hundred human beings of three races, four religions, eighteen nationalities; the only remnant of the human race nearer than Capella. Cudyk felt the night breeze freshening. He glanced upward once at the frosty blaze of stars, then pulled his head back inside the window. He closed the shutters, turning to the lamp-lit table with it’s hopeless clutter of books, pipes and dusty miscellany. Errors:
If you have any comments, I'd love to hear them. You can leave them below. I hope to see you back here, next week, for another Proofreading Course Weekly Roundup. If you're interested in becoming a proofreader, why not take a look at my great-value proofreading course? Click here.  This week’s weird words.
A proofreader without a vast vocabulary is at a considerable disadvantage. So, every week we’ll be introducing you to some of the more unusual words to grace the English language.
This week’s tricky words. Even exemplary proofreaders have their little blind spots. The No-Nonsense Proofreading Course provides a comprehensive list of the tricky words that can trip up even the most experienced proofreader. Here are just three of them:
This week’s proofreading exercise. From The Awakening by Kate Chopin: It was eleven o'clock that night when Mr. Pontellier returned from Klein's hotel. He was in an excellent humor, in high spirits, and very talkative. His entrance awoke his wife, who was in bed and fast asleep when he came in. He talked to her while he undressed, telling her anecdotes and bits of news and gossip that he had gathered during the day. From his trousers pockets he took a fistful of crumpled bank notes and a good deal of silver coin, which he piled on the bureau indiscriminately with keys, knife, handkerchief, and whatever else happened to be in his pockets. She was overcome with sleep, and answered him with little half utterances. He though it very discouraging that his wife, who was the sole object of his existence, evinced so little interest in things which concerned him, and valued so little his conversation. Mr. Pontellier had forgotten the bonbons and peanuts for the boys. Notwithstanding he loved them very much, and went into the ajoining room where they slept to take a look at them and make sure that they were resting comfortably. The result of his investigation was far from satisfactory. He turned and shifted the youngsters about in bed. One of them began to kick and talk about a basket full of crabs. Mr. Pontellier returned to his wife with the information that Raoul had a high fever and needed looking after. Then he lit a cigar and went and sat near the open door to smoke it. Mrs. Pontellier was quite sure Raoul had no fever. He had gone to bed perfectly well, she said, and nothing had ailed him all day. Mr. Pontellier was too well acquainted with fever symptoms to be mistaken. He assured her the child was consuming at that moment in the next room. He reproached his wife with her inattention, her habitual neglect of the children. If it was not a mother's place to look after children, whose on earth was it? He himself had his hands full with his brokerage business. He could not be in two places at once; making a living for his family on the street, and staying at home to see that no harm befell them. He talked in a monotonous, insistent way. Mrs. Pontelier sprang out of bed and went into the next room. She soon came back and sat on the edge of the bed, leaning her head down on the pillow. She said nothing, and refused to answer her husband when he questioned her. When his cigar was smoked out he went to bed, and in half a minute he was fast asleep.  If someone had told me at the outset that, a whole decade later, I’d be running a successful business, I’d have raised an eyebrow, to say the least.
Firstly, this was 2008. Things were not looking good for business. I can’t remember if anyone was using the term ‘The Great Recession’ at that point, but ‘financial crisis’ and ‘subprime mortgage crisis’ were in full circulation. Lehman Brothers had yet to bite the dust, but the writing was on the wall. The second reason I’d have raised an eyebrow was that it wasn’t really my intention to start a business. Not really. I was responding to an unfairness, to what I saw as a form of exploitation. Now I could be wrong, and this is just my opinion, but proofreading courses in 2008 were needlessly expensive. I mean, they’re needlessly expensive now, but we’re talking about 2008: Kung Fu Panda and the Sex and the City movie are still doing great box office and John Grisham's The Appeal is dominating the New York Times bestseller list. Hundreds of dollars for a proofreading course was just wrong. Or at the very least, it was unnecessary. The qualifications these proofreading courses offered were irrelevant. No one hiring proofreaders was asking for them. I knew that because I’d been hiring proofreaders for years and proofreading qualifications were not a part of any recruitment criteria. I looked at experience, and I had all applicants sit a test. A really tricky test. And that was it. No proofreading qualifications. No. Proofreading. Qualifications. The assessment process these proofreading courses insisted upon was unnecessary. Why did someone have to ‘mark’ work that was either right or wrong. These were not essays on the themes of justice and corruption in King Lear. These were public domain extracts with deliberate mistakes inserted into them. If they’d provided their students/customers with an answer sheet, they could have omitted the whole costly correspondence aspect of their business model, a cost passed onto you-know-who. Worst of all, these proofreading courses were expecting you to pay for grammar instruction. There were whole pages on dangling modifiers, split infinitives and when and where to use a semicolon. In 2018, all of that stuff is available free online. There are some fantastic grammar websites, and they won’t cost you a penny. Granted, in 2008, this wasn’t quite the case. The instruction was there but you had to put it together piecemeal. However, for about the cost of a cup of coffee, you could get hold of a second hand grammar book. Even a brand new grammar book would weigh-in at a fraction of the cost of these proofreading courses were expecting you to pay. Ten years later, and very little has changed. There are still a bunch of proofreading courses out there that are happy to charge you for the unnecessary. And The No-Nonsense Proofreading Course is still here, offering you a great-value alternative. Ten years. Wow. I’d just like to take this opportunity to thank everybody who has bought my proofreading training material over the years and for all those people, like Emma Steel, who have become advocates for The No-Nonsense Proofreading Course. If you’ve yet to give The No-Nonsense Proofreading Course a try, click here, to find out more. If you have any concerns or questions at all, please feel free to drop me an email here.  The answer is, yes, proofreading courses are worth it. Proofreading isn’t an innate talent; it’s a skill. There are lots of innate qualities that will make you predisposed to proofreading (such as vigilance and patience) but the skill itself really needs to be taught.
A good proofreading course will (or should!) provide you with:
This last point is really the crux of this blog post. There are lots of proofreading courses out there. Some of them are very good. Some of them are mediocre. In all honesty, I’ve yet to come across a truly bad proofreading course. However, most of them, whether very good or mediocre provide very little in the way of value. They are, in a word, expensive. In some cases, they are ludicrously expensive. But why are these proofreading courses so expensive, whilst The No-Nonsense Proofreading Course is just $48.99? Does The No-Nonsense Proofreading Course cut corners? No, it most certainly does not. It provides you with items 1 to 10 in the list above. And when it comes to the tenth item on that list, I believe it offers the greatest value of any proofreading course currently available online or anywhere else. The No-Nonsense Proofreading Course does something those other proofreading courses don’t. It enables you to carry out self-evaluations. Those other courses provide you with proofreading exercises that you then have to submit for evaluation. This is an expensive process for the course provider, requiring a certain amount of infrastructure and resource. The thing is, these evaluations are pointless. Why? Because the proofreading exercises they provide have a definitive set of right answers. They consist of existing pieces of writing that have had deliberate errors shoehorned into the text. If they were simply to provide you with the answers, you wouldn’t need to submit them for evaluation. The No-Nonsense Proofreading Course does just that. But, you ask, if they don’t evaluate me, how do I get my proofreading qualification? The answer to that question is simple. You don’t need a proofreading qualification. I’ve carried out professional proofreading work for decades and not once have I been asked to produce a proofreading qualification. Moreover, whilst I was responsible for hiring proofreaders, not once did I (or any HR department, for that matter) request a proofreading qualification from any potential candidate for a proofreading role or assignment. If you find that shockingly unlikely, go into any employment website and search for proofreading roles. Scan through the skills and qualifications needed for the role and you won’t find a single reference to a proofreading qualification. Possibly an English qualification. Possibly a specific technical qualification if the role is in a specialized environment. But never a proofreading qualification. Put simply, proofreading course don’t need to be expensive. The information can be conveyed in simple eBook form and you can very easily evaluate your own progress. Are proofreading course worth it? Yes, in the sense that it’s always worth learning the skills, essential even. But are they worth it in the broader, financial sense of the word ‘worth’? To be frank, most of them are not. Don’t get me wrong, there are some people who prefer the support structure of a more traditional training method: tutors, classrooms, assignments, assessments, qualifications. And I get that. Some people feel as if they’re not really learning unless all these components are present and correct. But I think most of us would rather save a chunk of cash and have a little faith in ourselves. Let me know what you think in the comments section below. Thank you for your time. Mike If you're interested in giving The No-Nonsense Proofreading Course a try, click here to find out more.  Obviously, I’m biased, but I genuinely believe that The No-Nonsense Proofreading Course gives you the best shot at securing freelance or full-time work as a proofreader. It not only shows you how to proofread, it also tells you how to go about creating and promoting a proofreading business. And it’s ridiculously inexpensive.
However, it’s been brought to my attention by a number of people who’ve bought and profited from The No-Nonsense Proofreading Course that there is an additional advantage to my particular product that I’ve failed to emphasize. Namely, the casual open-door policy I offer to all those who’ve purchased The No-Nonsense Proofreading Course. This is not something I’ve actively created as part of my business model, to be completely honest. It’s just that if someone emails me with a question or a concern, I think it’s rude not to at least try to provide an answer. People email me about intricate points of grammar, about what website platform to use, about whether they should accept a particular assignment, about where the line is drawn between proofreading and structural editing, about all kinds of things relating to my proofreading course, proofreading generally or the business side of proofreading. And, so far, I have answered every single email. Every single one. So, I want to take this opportunity to formalize this arrangement. From this point on, I will operate a virtual open-door policy for all customers of The No-Nonsense Proofreading Course. If you have a question, a concern or a conundrum relating to proofreading, feel free to drop me an email. I will do my level best to provide you with an answer within 48 hours. Now, obviously, I’m just one man, so there will be times, very occasionally, when I will not be able to honor this arrangement. But I will do my absolute best. If you wish to contact me, please use the form on the contact page, that way I will be able to alert you to any availability issues. Thank you. Mike |
Testimonials
“I am one of those many fools who paid a huge amount of money for a useless course. This book... has opened so many doors for me. I now look on Mike as my mentor as I embark on a career. Thank you Mike.” Emma Steel, Proofreader and International Structural Editor. “ I thoroughly enjoyed the course and am so glad that I decided to take it... the whole experience was invaluable. My proofreading service is now well established and your course played no small part in getting it off the ground.” Hache L. Jones, Proofreader. “I'd just like to thank you first of all for writing such a great, straight forward eBook, and then going above and beyond what I would even expect as a customer by providing us, completely free of charge, updated versions months later!” Rachel Gee, Trainee Proofreader. “What can I say? Worth every penny and then some! God Bless! This a fabulous course.” Teresa Richardson, Proofreader. “As someone who has effectively been proofreading for thirty years, I found Mike’s No-Nonsense Proofreading Course an invaluable introduction and a very useful practical guide to many aspects of this discipline. I can wholeheartedly recommend it as the ideal starting point, and much more besides.” Jeremy Meehan, Proofreader. Blog AuthorMy name's Mike Sellars and I'm an experienced proofreader and the author of The No-Nonsense Proofreading Course. Click here to find out more about me. 
The No-Nonsense Proofreading CourseA Fraction of the Cost of Other Proofreading Courses Credit card and PayPal payments accepted. “As someone who has been proofreading for 30 years, I found Mike’s course an invaluable introduction and a very useful practical guide to many aspects of the discipline. I can wholeheartedly recommend it.” Jeremy Meehan, Proofreader. Still want to find out more? Click here. Proofreading Categories
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