How many proofreaders does it take to change a lightbulb?
The light in my office is blinking. On, off, on, off, and on again. It’s very annoying and I’m thinking very hard about the process of fixing it. But the strange thing is, I hardly thought about the lightbulb at all yesterday. It was on, or it was off, and I didn’t care unless I was entering or exiting the room. And I’m realising now that there are a lot of things like that, such as shelves, magnets, rowboats and mirrors. All things which carry out their purpose and you don’t have to worry about them until something goes wrong. My job is a bit like that too.
As a proofreader, it’s my responsibility to make all the mistakes go away and for the text to be pristine, whether it’s 100 or 100,000 words long. It means that I have a very strange baseline for quality: perfection. Or at least, if anything about the text isn’t perfect, I can prove that it’s someone else’s fault. The side effect of this high bar is that succeeding in the task is binary. The lightbulb doesn’t get brighter or dimmer, it’s just on or off. You either make the text spotless, or you don’t. Even one piece of punctuation out of place results in the text being judged as not proofread correctly.
There is another way in which proofreading is like a lightbulb, and it’s not that we run on electricity. A lightbulb’s job isn’t actually to be seen, strangely enough, but to illuminate the things around it so that they can be seen. You don’t look at a torch’s light, you point it at something and look at that. In the same way, the proofreader’s job is to clean up text so that the author’s message shines through, and the reader isn’t distracted by a misspelt word or missing bit of punctuation. In this way, the proofreader’s job is to become invisible, and often thankless. Most people only really notice that proofreading happens when it goes wrong, when something in the text starts blinking at them like a lightbulb that’s not working. There’s probably been lots of times when you’ve noticed a mistake in a book or article and it’s ruined the mood for you, but have you ever gotten to the end of a piece of text and thought about how there weren’t any mistakes in it? I bet you haven’t.
Do you know any other jobs that are thankless by design? Or things in your home and day to day that you don’t consider until they suddenly break? I’d like to hear about them. While you’re thinking about that, I’m off to fetch a ladder.
