7 cruel proofreading traps that are lying in wait for you

Proofreading is a little like building a 50-foot cement wall to keep out an invading army: Thousands of soldiers are repelled, and then a tiny ant crawls under the wall, bites you on the ankle and you’re out of commission.

In every document are annoyingly small traps looking to take you down if you’re not careful. Knowing grammar and punctuation inside and out, and putting a spell-checker through its paces, can only take you so far. Remember these tips when reading something one last time before giving it the thumbs-up:

1. Look for the elephant in the room. The big bold text in headlines has a way of slipping right past our consciousness—after all, how could anyone make an error in such a prominent space? Ask the people who misspelled “college” on a huge banner spread across a baseball team’s dugout during a nationally televised game in 2013.

2. Hyphens can be harsh. A word split in two by a hyphen and continued on the next line is a devious thing; when text breaks, your mind does an invisible double-take and is susceptible to a swindle. Make sure nothing was left behind or added accidentally when that dash jumped into the fray.

3. Stamp out identity theft. Does Bob stay Bob throughout your document, or did he suddenly become Pete? Sometimes a search-and-replace doesn’t quite update everything, and name consistency is not typically something you focus on during the first or even second read.

4. Do the math. Simple addition and subtraction is almost never checked with a calculator when someone writes a piece. Come on, who would bother when seven times five is, and always has been, 42? Oops. Look at every number carefully—dates too. Are you just assuming the 14^th of March is a Sunday because someone wrote it down that way? Inaccurate dates can be a stealthy assassin to a proofreader.

5. Count your bullets. This article is called “7 cruel proofreading traps that are lying in wait for you.” Now, count how many we actually describe. Yes, the numbers match up. (They do, don’t they? Please say yes.) No one deleted or added one at the last minute—this time, but it could easily happen, making you look arithmetically challenged.

6. A picture is worth a thousand headaches. So, those photos that have been placed so artistically inside the document … they do actually match up with the text, right? You never know when someone’s left an old picture where it shouldn’t be, or they’ve simply grabbed the wrong one. For example, the image to the right. And then there’s the one-in-a-thousand chance that a picture’s position on the page syncs up with text you don’t want it to, creating unfortunate (and sometimes bizarre) connections in the reader’s mind.

7. Beware the Mistake of Mistakes. Just as Count Dracula is always keeping an eye out for wooden stakes in the area, so must you always be on guard for the world’s most sinister typo—of course we’re talking about the “public/pubic” misadventure, infamous in urban legend. If you misspell the word “misspell” or let a calendar go out showing Christmas on June 25, fine, but whatever happens, don’t let this one through. The Internet is ready to preserve it forever … and ever … and ever.

Now make a bold final charge against pesky typos

When you’re 99.9 percent sure your document is gold, try the following to recalibrate your mind and detect what may still be cleverly hiding:

1. Run the pages through the copier to produce something twice their normal size and be amazed at what you spot when sentences get huge.

2. Read the document while standing up, or lying down, or in some other slightly unusual position. Just come at it from a slightly different physical angle.

3. Find everything totally fascinating. Pore over the material as if you’re not looking for errors at all; you’re just a fan of the subject matter and immersing yourself like a reader would. You’ll make different connections and new logical inferences.

Deep breath. Did we miss any typos in this article? If we did, you know where to find us.