Our paper carried the notice last week that Mr. Jonas Marjoriebanks is a
defective on the police force. This was a typographical error. Mr.
Marjoriebanks is, of course, a detective on the police farce.
—ANON
Be not ashamed of mistakes and thus make them crimes.
—CONFUCIUS
DID YOU KNOW THAT TYPING ERRORS (which we’ll just call typos) breed secretly, at night? And when you fix one, six more grow up in its place. At least, this is my theory.
So, how do you catch the little monkeys? First, start fresh. Don’t expect to proofread effectively the minute you have finished writing.
Margins and such like
Take a look at the overall impression your document gives you. Are your
margins all lined up as they should be? Maybe you had headings centred
and subheadings on the left, so check that they are where they should be.
Does some print look bigger or darker than the rest? Maybe some mistakes
slipped in when you decided to change the font or the font size. If your
headings are all supposed to be in bold, make sure they are. Make sure
your choices of capitalization in headings and subheadings are consistent.
References
If you have references, check that they are correct. Make sure all the periods
and commas are in the right places. It is very easy to slip up with these.
For Internet addresses, try them out.
Placing of pictures
If there are pictures, are they still beside the text they are supposed to be
illustrating? Sometimes during editing, they can move. If there are photos,
are the photographers named, and the people in the photos? And do you
have the pictured people’s consent, in writing, to publish photos of them?
Spelling and grammar check
Now you are almost ready to start on the text itself. Do you have your
word-processing program set to Canadian English? If you have not made
that change, it will almost certainly default to US English. Even with Canadian
English, it may omit the u in words like colour and honour. Whichever way you plan to spell, just make sure you are consistent. Canadians tend to
favour the extra u. We also spell words with re where Americans more often
use er, as in centre, sombre and calibre. Using s instead of z (as in organisation or organization) is yet another difference between US and British English
which Canadians must make up their minds about.