Avoid embarrassment with five easy proofreading tips
Do you have a favourite typo? Enter ‘funny typos’ into Google and you’ll find a seemingly endless list of humorous malapropisms, spoonerisms, misspellings and grammatical errors.
The most common culprit seems to be Chinese menus, where the names of dishes often get lost in translation (anyone for human sauce?). In many cases, the authors of these errors are unlikely to have the advantage of an editor and proofreader reviewing their work. But when the source is a peer-reviewed academic journal, you can be forgiven for wondering how the mistake made it through the extensive review stages. And so it was for a paper published in the journal Ethology, which has been attracting attention for all the wrong reasons.
Under normal circumstances ‘Variation in Melanism and Female Preference in Proximate but Ecologically Distinct Environments’ probably wouldn’t generate much interest beyond a fairly select readership. What the editor, proofreader, authors and reviewers failed to notice was that the final draft went to print with the comment ‘should we cite the crappy Gabor paper here?’ as a parenthetical note in the middle of a sentence.
But one reader did notice, and tweeted an image with the unintentionally candid passage highlighted. As is the nature of the internet, word quickly spread, culminating in this piece in the online current affairs and culture magazine Slate.
There are a couple of obvious lessons here. If you are going to insert your working notes directly into your document, make sure you can easily distinguish them from the actual text (for example, by using the ‘highlighter’ feature of Microsoft Word). Better still, use the ‘comments’ function, which is designed for this very purpose.
Secondly, avoid writing something that is going to be embarrassing should it end up in the final version, just in case. In apologising for the error, the author of the Ethology paper attributed it to a co-author, claiming ‘I would never condone this sentiment towards another person or their work’.
Here are some other techniques you can try, to avoid embarrassing errors in your writing:
Take a break (preferably at least an hour) before coming back to what you’ve written. Time will make it easier to read over your words afresh.
Save the document as a PDF, then use the Adobe Reader ‘read out loud’ function to listen back to what you’ve written—hearing the text can make it easier to identify errors.
Read the text backwards, word for word, to give your eyes and brain a different perspective. Alternatively, use a ruler to reveal only one line of text at a time.
Change the font and size, or use a different view (e.g. ‘preview’ mode) to change how the document looks—this will help you notice any errors.
Have a colleague or friend (or perhaps a professional editor) read over what you’ve written to provide a ‘second pair of eyes’.
