Let me through – I'm a proofreader!

One of the adverts that adorned the Engine Room this evening read: Make £500pwk Proofreading For 100's Of UK Publishers.

Ok, per week or pw, but pwk? Why is every word capped? Why is there an apostrophe in 100's?

So the ad should read: Make £500 per week proofreading for hundreds of UK publishers.

May I have my £500 now, please?

And on the subject of ads, I just heard a TV ad for a nappy cream which promises to "protect... and care". An inanimate object "caring"? Does no-one at ad agencies read the code of conduct nowadays?

Shows, crows, and the busiest day of the year

It's press day in show week – perhaps the busiest day in our magazine's calendar. With twice as many news pages as usual to sub, lay out, proof, correct, send down and approve, all of the production desk has a hectic five or six hours. Not to mention that our technical editor has to do all of his proofing remotely, as he's down at the show too.

Actually we've gone to press now, which is why I have a few minutes to write this post. We'll find out tomorrow if there were any major screw-ups, I suppose.

I did nearly let an embarrassing one slip through earlier – tapping in a headline for one story, my finger must have slipped, as instead of writing 'New Magnum cab draws crowd' I wrote 'New Magnum cab draws crows'. Quite a surreal image. Fortunately I spotted it before it went out on proof. I'm sure our proofreaders would have picked up on it, though I can only imagine the stick they would have given me...

Substantive editing

I recently found a nice little web page outlining the differences between copy editing, proofreading, and a third type of editing, 'substantive editing'. This third type of editing:

looks at both the content and structure of a manuscript as a cohesive whole. Does the story or argument flow logically? Are there obvious gaps in a certain area? Too much information someplace else? Substantive editing can involve re-ordering large chunks of text, removing text, adding text, and even rewriting

This quite accurately describes a lot of the work that Apus and I do (in addition to our copy-editing duties). We are both sub editors (or subeditors, or sub-editors if you will), which is a job title that seems to be confined to this side of the Atlantic. Is it possible that the 'sub' in 'sub editor' stands for 'substantive'? Probably not, but it's a nice thought, and it might be of interest to our American copy-editor readership...