the spectator by ned piper

At a class reunion in 2007, Sue gave a copy of the paper to Kate Packard, a former R.A. Long High School classmate, who took the paper home with her to North Bend, Oregon. A few days later, she called Sue.

“I’m impressed,” Kate said. “I only found 16 typos. That’s very good for a local paper.”

“What?! 16 typos?” Sue responded, horrified, quickly recruiting Kate to proofread from afar.

Kate helped with a few issues via email, but the process was too cumbersome. It’s much better to have actual pages to make corrections on, noting misspellings, awkward sentence structure, two periods at the end of a sentence and incorrect page numbers.

We now have a team of six dedicated proofreaders who pour over each word, each sentence, paragraph and page, searching for anything that may need fixing.

We mark up the errors with red pens. The error may be as simple as a word indented where it shouldn’t be. Or a word that Spellcheck changed. Like the time s story contained, “I stopped on the way to Bend, Oregon, and played nine holes of gold with an old friend.” Of course the writer knew he’d played golf, not gold, but didn’t notice his computer had changed it. One of our “proofies,” as we affectionately refer to them, circled the word in red ink and wrote the word “golf” out to the side, for Sue to correct before sending the files off to the printer.

Two things happen at the end of each proofreading session: Sue inquires and one of us invariably announces, “Finally, the first perfect issue!”

Sue then treats the team to dinner where we can all relax, generally at one of the local restaurants that advertises in the paper.

Over the years our group has blossomed into quite the team of perfectionists. At times, a stranger entering the room would think they’d stumbled into a Christian Science Reading Room; we are all in rapt and silent concentration. At other times someone will laugh at something they’ve just read. That may cause one of us to inquire, “What’s funny?” This leads to a read-aloud, which may lead to someone relating a personal story.

We all come from different backgrounds. We have a former teacher, a former restaurant owner who, in her younger years, worked as a proofreader at The Daily News, two published authors and two writers of monthly columns in the Reader.

I must say that serving in this capacity has given me empathy for the errors I uncover in other newspapers. We may not be perfect, but we give it the old college try. And we continue to strive for the elusive first perfect issue.