This is what Mark Twain had to say on the subject of proofreading :
The difference between the almost-right word & the right word is really a large matter--it's the difference between the lightning-bug & the lightning. Mark Twain's well-known observation appears at the top of the "Language/Writing" page of a university's continuing education website--just above a blurb for "Mistake-Free Grammar & Proofreading." Except that Twain's line is misquoted, and the word lightning is twice misspelled as lightening.
Twain had little patience for such errors. "In the first place, God made idiots," he wrote once. "This was for practice. Then he made proof-readers."
Yet as a once newspaper reporter, Twain knew full well how hard it is to proofread effectively. He once said in a letter to Walter Bessant in February 1898: You think you are reading proof, whereas you are merely reading your own mind; your statement of the thing is full of holes & vacancies but you don't know it, because you are filling them from your mind as you go along. Sometimes--but not often enough--the printer's proof-reader saves you--& offends you--with this cold sign in the margin: (?) & you search the passage & find that the insulter is right--it doesn't say what you thought it did: the gas-fixtures are there, but you didn't light the jets.
No matter how carefully we examine a text, it seems there is always one more small blunder waiting to be discovered.
The difference between the almost-right word & the right word is really a large matter--it's the difference between the lightning-bug & the lightning. Mark Twain's well-known observation appears at the top of the "Language/Writing" page of a university's continuing education website--just above a blurb for "Mistake-Free Grammar & Proofreading." Except that Twain's line is misquoted, and the word lightning is twice misspelled as lightening.
Twain had little patience for such errors. "In the first place, God made idiots," he wrote once. "This was for practice. Then he made proof-readers."
Yet as a once newspaper reporter, Twain knew full well how hard it is to proofread effectively. He once said in a letter to Walter Bessant in February 1898: You think you are reading proof, whereas you are merely reading your own mind; your statement of the thing is full of holes & vacancies but you don't know it, because you are filling them from your mind as you go along. Sometimes--but not often enough--the printer's proof-reader saves you--& offends you--with this cold sign in the margin: (?) & you search the passage & find that the insulter is right--it doesn't say what you thought it did: the gas-fixtures are there, but you didn't light the jets.
No matter how carefully we examine a text, it seems there is always one more small blunder waiting to be discovered.
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