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Just interested in what everyone does re. proofreading. Do you do it yourself .... or hire a proofreader? Have you taken any proofreading courses .... or are just self taught? Do you not bother too much - after all the publisher will be doing it anyway so why duplicate effort?
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Then, a reader of mine, who also happens to be a very sharp-eyed proofreader, pointed out a few things - only tiny details, like spacing/hyphens v. en dashes/indents and I realised that I hadn't achieved the perfection I thought I had!
I am currently in the process of using CreateSpace to make paperbacks. Luckily, I now have two proofreaders on board who are providing their services free of charge (family, but experienced).
I have also since learned to use the back-to-front P sign that highlights spacing. I had a habit of accidentally including one space at the beginning of a paragraph when I'd split a chunk. I was also a habitual 'tabber' which I've stopped. I use the 'Find' feature to find words like 'onto' so that I can change it to 'on to' and 'O.K.'/'Okay' to 'OK', for example. Searching for 'ly' helps me eliminate adverbs. When I send my work to my proofreaders now, there is very little left to put right.
I'm sure editors will tidy things up even more, but it shows a writer in a better light if it's done to the best of their ability from the word go.
Edited to add: I've just bought the 'New Oxford Dictionary for Writers and Editors'.
I have so far proofread my own work, and I do miss things. It's so hard to see beyond what you thought you'd written, because you read your own work by memory and by the sound of the words in your head. It helps to change format - print it out, put it on Kindle (I find the smaller chunks of text make mistakes more obvious), change colour or font size - any difference will wake you up.
It embarrasses me horribly to find I've missed an error in something I've published. I've just been in conversation with an American author who had a few glaring oddities in her novel, and she was very grateful, and has made changes.
I've got a proofreading guide, but my best tools are a red pen and a green one.
I have a couple of guides to English usage and grammar, a reference sheet of proofing symbols, red and green pens and mini post-its for noting editorial tweaks as my short-term memory is borderline goldfish! I always proofread on paper. I need to get into the habit of proofing promotional material to 'book' standard - I'm still cringing about missing the middle 's' out of 'Sainsbury's' on a book signing poster I posted on Facebook!