by rmsgrey
Gilby wrote:
clydeiii wrote:
I think it's pretty reasonable to assume the proofs were copyedited, actually.
They likely were. Errors were just missed.
That's not uncommon, of course. Copyediting isn't as easy as it's made out to be.
Amen to that. Each proofreader's effectiveness at finding problems is highest on the first pass, and plummets rapidly - once you've looked at something and not seen the problem with it once, you're even less likely to see it next time unless it's been long enough for you to forget it.
Spell-check can help a lot, but only when your text is in a format the spell-checker can understand - and if you're up against time pressure, and have a number of words spell-check doesn't know, it's easy to overlook a genuine typo among the false-positives.
I've proof-read for friends a number of times in the past, only to have a number of typos jump out at me when I read over the finished product...