Great proofreaders know it isn't all about grammar and spelling

Apologies for the interruption to our Proofreading 101 series but I thought this was a little too important to postpone.

In The No-Nonsense Proofreading Course, there is a chapter entitled From Effective Proofreader to Indispensable Proofreader (It’s Really Not That Far). Okay, so it isn’t the pithiest of chapter headings but it does the job.

Anyway, in that particular chapter, you’ll find all kinds of tips that will help you demonstrate to your employer or client that you aren’t just a human grammar- and spell-checker, that you are able to bring to your work a degree of perceptiveness, common sense and rigor that they simply cannot expect from your run-of-the-mill proofreader.

I’m currently in the process of creating the third edition of the eBook and have added some information to the aforementioned chapter that I think is too important to keep from you until publication.

So, here it is.

When proofreading, you will often come across contact information of one sort or another: telephone numbers, email addresses, URLs. The quotidian (what a beautiful word for ‘ordinary’) proofreader will check these for literal errors and obvious deviations from common sense. The indispensable proofreader will call-up the numbers, test out the email addresses to make sure they don’t generate delivery errors and cut and paste URLs into their browser to make sure they actually lead somewhere and not to a 404 or ‘Not Found’ message.

It’s little things like this that will elevate you above the competition. So, while your quotidian peers are quibbling over split infinitives, dangling modifiers and hyphenation usage, you will actually be providing your employer or customer with an outstanding 360-degree service.

Proofreading 101 will resume shortly.