I declared myself the Czar of Proofreading about 20 years ago when I found that many people were making absurd typographical errors and not correcting them or even seeing them. The new use of computers and e-mail was making it easier for everybody to type text, but harder to make it correct. Now, there ain’t no secretaries, and there ain’t no typing pool, and there ain’t no word-processing specialists. Everybody’s gotta botch up their own typing—and we sure do!
Many people agree that it’s hard to do serious, accurate proofreading from a computer screen. Printing the texts on paper helps a lot. Likewise, checking a new schematic versus an old one is pretty hard, and it’s nearly impossible if you don’t take a pencil and scribble over every item on the old schematic right after you have compared it to the new one. It’s easy to think it’s right and hard to actually get everything right.
I do know how to spell Czochralski. I have found it spelled right and wrong. Spell-checkers don’t even know how to spell it wrong. They certainly don’t know how to spell it right. Spell-checkers are mostly a snare and delusion. There are many words that the more you look at them, the more they look right, even if they’re wrong, and vice versa. That’s when even I need a dictionary. And I don’t always trust the dictionary.
Proofreading Gone Awry
This proofreading mania largely started back 38 years ago when I was at Philbrick. Some well-intentioned guy brought in a speed-reading course by Evelyn Wood. A lot of us managers and technical guys were invited to take the course. I survived the course but found that speed-reading a book did not make me happy or educated or enlightened.
Then we took a contract on a fast analog-digital system. We had made these systems before, but there was a new, improved spec. The customer had made an innocuous little change, requiring the bandwidth for measuring noise to change from 1.0 MHz to 10 MHz. The guys who were speed-reading the contracts didn’t notice the change of the decimal point.
After we noticed the change, it was too late to ask for any relief. I can assure you, it was a brutal task to get the noise down to the same level, but for a tenfold increase in bandwidth. We wasted a lot of time covering for that dumb proofreading error. We wasted a lot more time (and money) than we ever saved by speed-reading.
Since that time, I have been reading more slowly, but enjoying it more. I don’t speed-read contracts. I’m catching the errors, both typographical and philosophical. I’m catching my errors and the errors of others. My wife says I’m starting to sound like my mother.
We know that handwritten text can look pretty good, but then when it is typed, certain errors pop up. Then when it is typeset, you can find even more errors! For example, some phrases that used to look okay won’t look right once they’re in type.
Continue to next page