First Word

My favorite rebuke of 3L Publishing's editorial services comes from professional journalists, English teachers or editors who swear in stone they don't need our editorial services. This declaration always leaves me smiling like the all-knowing publisher that I am. Let me entertain you now with true confessions: I (the publisher and professional editor) NEED a proofreader ! Shock! Awe! No ... you ? Yes, me. Let me take this a step further: I don't care if you're a Pulitzer Prize winner for literature, guess what? You still need a proofreader. I have said this in the past to help laypeople understand how hard it is to proofread, so I will use the analogy again: Imagine taking a huge jar of 100,000 black jellybeans. Now take those black jellybeans and spill them on a white table. Now go look for the flawed beans. You will find you have to pick each one up, look at it, and put it back, and so on. Friends, THAT is how difficult it is to perfect a manuscript with 100,000 ...

Okay, so that headline is a little strong ... masses LOL. Makes me think of Music for the Masses or wait! Was that Music for the People ... or perhaps Ghost in the Machine or Kiss for the Rose ... LMAO ... I am in a weird, little mood today. All right so yesterday I was reading the mass of junk mail I receive in my in-box, and one newsletter stood out. It had some great public relations information. I saw an article on proofreading, and it gave some great tips for the layperson to use. I have my own, so I thought I would share and help the "masses" or better yet the average businessperson. Tip #1 -- Take a piece of paper and cover up everything but the sentence you are reading . I like to call this the "non-green" method because unless you do this on a flat-screen like an iPad, you have to print up what you're proofing. This method works because your eye is not somehow wandering ahead of the sentence. The "wandering" eye isn't really controll...