Writing is easy.
Research is tough. Rewriting is tough. Editing is tough. And most of all, at least in my experience, proofreading is tough.
I’ve learned the techniques – read the copy carefully, two or three times. Read it backwards. Sit back and let your eye bounce down the page like a ping-pong ball, stopping to check whenever some anomaly (real or imagined) catches your eye.
Grizzled ol’ editors find it hard to let a project go to print. It’s the long experience that sees, in the mirror, the gray hairs that bear silent witness to the times the copy didn’t get proofread closely enough. The gut shrieks out at you; there’s a typo waiting to jump up from the page, I know it …
Somewhere in Southern Colorado by now is the grave of a nun who, some thirty-plus years ago, took great umbrage at a headline I wrote for the local newspaper. Sister Frances, a true saint who never quite cozied up to my style, was a venerable elder, a person of some authority at the Catholic school across the street from my newspaper office.
I’m sure I hastened that woman’s trip to that grave, but I’ll swear to the day I enter mine that I really was trying to suck up to the local Catholic community, to get in their good graces, as it were.
The perspective of years has softened the memory. Still, a shudder spills down my spine when I imagine the priest’s consternation later that evening in the Confessional, and the subsequent penance he must have meted out to this benevolent humanitarian in the wake of the tongue-lashing she delivered to me that day.
That morning I had penned a HUGE – hee-yoooo-uge headline over a feature story that I’d written glowingly and twice too long. The story was the newspaper’s coverage of the Catholic schoolchildren’s May 1 celebration of spring – a festive gala involving a crown of flowers arrayed to adorn a statue of the Blessed Virgin Mary.
I swear on all that is holy that I intended all who read that afternoon’s newspaper to vicariously share the joy of those uniformed schoolgirls pictured on the front page reveling in the coming of spring, crowning that marble statue with flowers that might have come from the Garden of Eden itself.
When the afternoon edition hit the newsstands, the old woman quickly and surely strode across the street to go mano-a-mano with El Diablo incarnate – me. But even as the diatribe rose to a crescendo, I was still unclear why this usually gracious holy woman was berating me.
Then my eyes fell to the newspaper splayed across the office countertop. Amidst the good sister’s frantic gesticulations and clamoring, it slowly dawned on me that I’d failed to adequately proofread my own copy.
Inadvertantly – repeat, inadvertantly – and to my eternal dismay, the letter “n” had been omitted from the first word of the headline. In letters nearly an inch tall, I had forged a message for all the citizenry enjoy our newspaper’s coverage of the Crowing of the May Queen.
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