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Proofreading for everyone

Archive for April, 2012

Reprinting is ruinous

Monday, April 30th, 2012

You organise professional printing for the important documents: brochures, advertisements, product information, magazine articles. Before the printer makes the plates he asks you to sign the proof.

Hence you approve the colours, images, writing, fonts, layout and everything else. Then the job gets made.

So it has to be right. If someone finds a mistake later, it can’t be helped. You approved it — you either live with it or reprint it. Reprinting a job often leaves its cost-effectiveness in ruins.

But it’s easy to avoid both the ruinous expense and the blot on your reputation.

Just be smart — before you sign the proof, send it to FastProof.

Do you need FastProof?

Monday, April 30th, 2012

What exactly is proofreading?

Everyone’s different, and their documents are different. It’s hard to make rules for them all, so we’re flexible.

FastProof is designed to be fast, inexpensive and good quality. To fulfil the promise of bringing proofreading to everyone, we correct only spelling, punctuation and basic grammar. Correcting basic grammar means fixing missing words, an incorrect plural, replacing “than” with “then” — miscellaneous things like that. We love it.

So FastProof corrects mistakes but doesn’t try to “improve” your writing — it doesn’t try to find a better word than the one you’ve used.

We take the view that your writing is perfect, but there could be unintentional flaws (as anyone might leave). We spot and correct such flaws quickly, so the price stays down. Lingering over what you’ve said to consider how one might say it better takes longer, so we don’t do that. Unless you ask us to, then we give it to WordShine.

If the author is a native English speaker, FastProof is probably all you need to polish the writing.

“S” is for possessive

Monday, April 23rd, 2012

The letter “s” is used with an apostrophe to indicate possession — as in “my aunt’s pen.” The usage goes back over 1500 years, around 450 AD, to Old English, language of the Anglo-Saxons. The language had deep roots in Latin, Ancient Greek and Sanskrit which produced a complex system of noun declensions and verb conjugations, most of which have gone now, leaving mere remnants (like this curiosity of possessiveness).

How did the genitive case work? Important nouns were given the ending “es” to indicate the genitive — the possessive case — like “the cloud’s velocity.” As time went by more and more nouns were treated like this, so by the Middle English period (1000–1400) this method of indicating the possessive applied to all nouns. But by then the letter “e” in the “es” was no longer pronounced and was redundant.

So about the middle of the 1500’s English printers began to omit a silent “e” and replace it with an apostrophe, which was hitherto a French practice. Hence “my auntes pen” became “my aunt’s pen” and remains like that today.

The practice is way behind us, so “the cates pyjamas” has become “the cat’s pyjamas”. We no longer recognise our ancestores ways!

Those thirsty for more can visit Wikipedia on Old English.