I am, so to speak, a professional proofreader.

By "so to speak", I mean that for forty-six years I have been a court reporter. I take down, in high-speed machine shorthand, every last word said in a meeting, along with the identification of the speaker, and what punctuation I can insert "on the fly" at three to four words a second. For twenty-two of those years I would dictate on a transcription machine everything, including paragraphing, speaker identification, and punctuation, and send the recording to a typist. Then I'd proofread what I got back from her. In the 80s, computer transcription came along, and I would deal on screen with what amounted to a rough draft, which will have to be paragraphed, punctuation corrected, and speaker identification checked/corrected.

You should understand that I deal with others' logic, vocabulary, grammar, and syntax. So I need to know a lot about "the rules" but I can almost never apply them in a formally "correct" way. I have to apply "the rules" in something of an approximate way, trying to clarify the words that speakers supply by what is sometimes creative punctuation, and insightful paragraphing. In the years with the court before my retirement I would produce anywhere from nine thousand to fifteen thousand pages! Please believe that in that one fifteen-thousand-page year the level of proofreading was much lower than what I discuss below.

Once through the text--which may produce two hundred fifty pages for one day's proceedings--I know that I absolutely may not, cannot just print out what I've produced. First I run what some would call a spell checker. The manufacturer calls it "an automated editing system". It's a spell checker all right, but it finds and flags repeated words, certain typical errors in speaker identification, and many punctuation errors. The punctuation errors of course may not be errors at all in the context of my work as described.

After I deal with those possible changes, am I ready to print? Not on your life!

Now I read the entire job while listening to a backup tape recording of the session. I always find problems that escaped in the previous steps.

So now am I ready to print? Not on yer tintype, McGee!

Now I read the whole thing again with the tape, trying hard to read with a deliberate, word-by-word focused attention, with no room for any kind of skimming. Again, I will almost always find something wrong even at this late stage.

At this point I am so heartily sick of the whole matter that I declare it done. Any further proofreading, in addition to wasting a lot of extra time for very little more improvement, would drive me even crazier than I am by this time. I print.

And STILL, if I were to read the hard copy (which I try to avoid), I will sometimes find something. Oh, well.

In another post I'll probably discuss what I do to proofread my on-line posts, which is an entirely different matter.

Dave Oesterreich