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[JesusA (imported)]

The the impotence of proofreading

By Taylor Mali

www.taylormali.com

Has this ever happened to you?

You work very horde on a paper for English clash

And then get a very glow raid (like a D or even a D=)

and all because you are the word¹s liverwurst spoiler.

Proofreading your peppers is a matter of the the utmost impotence.

This is a problem that affects manly, manly students.

I myself was such a bed spiller once upon a term

that my English teacher in my sophomoric year,

Mrs. Myth, said I would never get into a good colleague.

And that¹s all I wanted, just to get into a good colleague.

Not just anal community colleague,

because I wouldn¹t be happy at anal community colleague.

I needed a place that would offer me intellectual simulation,

I really need to be challenged, challenged dentally.

I know this makes me sound like a stereo,

but I really wanted to go to an ivory legal collegue.

So I needed to improvement

or gone would be my dream of going to Harvard, Jail, or Prison

(in Prison, New Jersey).

So I got myself a spell checker

and figured I was on Sleazy Street.

But there are several missed aches

that a spell chukker can¹t can¹t catch catch.

For instant, if you accidentally leave a word

your spell exchequer won¹t put it in you.

And God for billing purposes only

you should have serial problems with Tori Spelling

your spell Chekhov might replace a word

with one you had absolutely no detention of using.

Because what do you want it to douch?

It only does what you tell it to douche.

You¹re the one with your hand on the mouth going clit, clit, clit.

It just goes to show you how embargo

one careless clit of the mouth can be.

Which reminds me of this one time during my Junior Mint.

The teacher read my entire paper on A Sale of Two Titties

out loud to all of my assmates.

I¹m not joking, I¹m totally cereal.

It was the most humidifying experience of my life,

being laughed at pubically.

So do yourself a flavor and follow these two Pisces of advice:

One: There is no prostitute for careful editing.

And three: When it comes to proofreading,

the red penis your friend.

[Bagoas (imported)]

{sigh}

If a person doesn't know how to spell, proofreading his own text is a waste of time One must, then, find a more lexically accurate proofreader than oneself.

There are VERY few words which I cannot spell. However, there are VERY many words which I cannot type accurately. I learned to type on a 1920's typewriter in which the keys were 1½ inches apart. The crowded keyboards of today's electric typewriters and computers have always given me trouble. The keys are barely 3/4 inch apart and I keep striking adjacent keys inadvertently.

As I have become more fimble-fungered with age, this problem has worsened. In addition, I have always had a problem with striking the keys in the wrong order, thus rtansposing letters. If I did not proofread my text, it would be gibberish. I spend about half as much time RE-typing as I spent in typing. E.g.

sa U dsaid, I esobd nmreasly as mivh tinr TR-typiung aqs U dif tyyopibg. (I'm exaggerating, of course.)

For me, Spell-Check is useless. The problem is that I have and use a MUCH larger vocabulary than Spell Check knows.["Don't tell ME there's no such word, you DIGITAL IGNORAMUS !] If I use the word "wont", I DON'T want it corrected to "want". At least, though, I KNOW that a word is mis-typed when I see it.

As a result, a 4-page story takes me ALL NIGHT to type.

[sailorboy (imported)]

Yes sir. When I wrote my Part One of my story, the Spellchecker kept saying there was no such word OR would allow me to use were instead of "where", which was gramatically correct and I just left out the "h" when I wrote the story. One must use Spellchecker with a "caution" and proofread as the Spellchecker goes over various words.

Sailorboy

[JoaoGenerico (imported)]

I've just post my first contribution. I wrote it on Word, which has a quite good spell / grammar checker, and still there are errors which it can't detect (like using a wrong noun in the place of another).

I swear I've proofread the text thrice and even so, I am horrified by the quantity of errors I've missed. It is always a good idea to have *other* people to proofread your text, because you tend to ignore your own errors.

The fact that many authors don't speak English as their first language doesn't help either.

I'd like to contribute other stories, but given the nature of the text, I am not comfortable in asking my friends to proofread them.

I've seen an ancient thread were people offered to proofread the text for the authors. It would be a really good idea to promote this idea again. It would be nice to have someone else to review the story and correct your spelling, grammar before you make it public.

[Slammr (imported)]

On a serious note, it's easy to miss errors on a story you write. You know what you meant to say, so it's easy to skip over a missing word or some other error. I can read and re-read a story, then submit it, only to discover errors right after it's posted.

[Kangan (imported)]

Spell checkers can produce the most hilarious sorts of errors. Thank you, Jesus!

I know how to spell most words, but as a child I mostly read books by British authors, so I tend to use the British spellings at times when writing. And I almost always manage to hit two keys at the same time which really scrambles things on a modern electronic keyboard. I do miss my old Teletype machine which would only allow a single key to depress and had a nice mechanical rhythmic feel as a result. However, I don't miss everything being in CAPS only and the horribly slow baud rate of 45.45 (6 characters per second).

[Kortpeel (imported)]

...

so I tend to use the British spellings at times when writing. .

And why not? Why perpetuate Noah Webster's errors?

If you do have to proof read your own work it does help to leave it for a couple of weeks and then come back to it. There are two advantages to this. One: you can pick up typos and other errors that you were blind to before. Secondly: you can pick up clumsy sentence constructions.

Clumsy sentence constructions arise from writing as you speak. Sometimes, without the intonation of speech a written sentence can be misleading. "Write it down just like you would say it" is great for a teacher trying to get a class to write anything at all but if you're trying to write to entertain and interest people other than your teacher it calls for a shade more skill.

The best advice of all for budding writers, in my opinion, is to keep on writing and keep on trying.

Kortpeel

[JoaoGenerico (imported)]

I still think a volunteer proofreader comitee would be nice.

[plix (imported)]

I do not proofread stories other than to ensure that they meet the guidelines. To read every word of every story in detail and correct every single grammatical and typographical error would be far too time-consuming.

The way I do it is the grammatical errors in a story are either extensive enough to justify deletion or not. If they are, the story is deleted. If they are not, the story is accepted.

I am considering asking for some additional editors who would volunteer their time to actually read the stories in detail and correct errors. The volunteers would have to somehow (not sure how yet) demonstrate an extensive knowledge of English grammar. If enough readers express an interest in having errors in the stories they read corrected, then it is something I can definitely look into. Of course input from the authors who write said stories would need to be considered as well.

[Slammr (imported)]

I am considering asking for some additional editors who would volunteer their time to actually read the stories in detail and correct errors. The volunteers would have to somehow (not sure how yet) demonstrate an extensive knowledge of English grammar. If enough readers express an interest in having errors in the stories they read corrected, then it is something I can definitely look into. Of course input from the authors who write said stories would need to be considered as well.

If you do this, I would recommend that no corrections are made without consulting the author. If I'm writing in a "voice" or writing in first person, especially if I'm writing in the "voice" of a kid, I will make deliberate errors in grammar. This can be carried too far, of course, but the story should be in the "voice" of the person that seems to be telling it, and most people -- especially kids -- don't use perfect grammar when they speak.