Who knew, but yes, there is a Proofreading Day that is observed on March 8th and has been since 2011.
“In 2011, Judy Beaver created Proofreading Day in remembrance of her mother, Flo. On her website, Judy relates that her mother loved to correct people. She thought by creating the day on her mother’s birthday it would be a fun way to remember her, and help people take more time to proofread their work!”
I’ve covered this subject before on this blog with this post, this post, and this post especially. You can see it’s a subject near and dear to my heart.
I’m usually pretty good at spotting errors in things I’m reading unless I’m speedreading to finish something quickly. I’ve been called a perfectionist, a grammar troll, and a few things that aren’t anywhere near as nice as those two labels. The things is, I don’t really try to do so most of the time; these things just jump out at me.
Proofreading my own writing is “a whole ‘nother story” as one of my friends used to say. And it’s for the same reason that proofreading your own writing is a bad idea for anyone; because your mind fills in words or meanings that failed to come out through your fingers.
I don’t have the luxury of hiring a proofreader for any of my blog writing so I employ some tricks based on spellcheck and grammar software and some such as reading my words backwards to do my best to reduce the errors that might creep in. Still, sometimes it happens because we’re all human.
But if I were publishing something that people were paying for, like a newspaper, magazine, or book, I would be damn sure to have at least one other set of eyeballs read through my words and correct any errors that I may have made.
Happy Proofreading Day, everyone!