Who’d make a better proofreader: Lynne Truss or George Costanza?
Lynne Truss – author of Eats, Shoots and Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation – knows the rules of grammar and punctuation inside out and is militant about following them. She’s been known to march along high streets, helpfully correcting misplaced apostrophes in shop signs, billboards and greengrocers’ windows.
And then there’s George Costanza, the Seinfeld character played by Jason Alexander, whose greatest talent is gauging the bare minimum amount of effort he can put in at work without getting sacked for underperformance.
So if I’m sending my annual report to print on Monday and I need to be sure there are no embarrassing mistakes in there?
I’m sending it to George.
Wait, was that a typo?
No. Because here’s the thing: encyclopaedic knowledge of spelling and grammar is not the most important quality for a proofreader. The true skill of an excellent proofreader is knowing what to leave alone.
Lynne Truss is undoubtedly more knowledgeable about language than George Costanza. I bet she can spot the difference between a hyphen and an en dash, and knows all the differences between US and UK English (not just the obvious ones like the u in colour, but the trickier ones like how many “l”s to put in “enrolled”).
But Lynne’s also a stickler. She’s opinionated about this stuff. She’s a crusader. It’s right there in the title of her book: Zero Tolerance. My annual report’s coming back from Lynne absolutely slathered in markup. She’s making changes to standardise all our serial commas. She’s rewriting whole sentences to eliminate dangling modifiers. Even – and here’s the important point – even when the text is already perfectly easy to read and understand.
My poor design team’s going to despair when they open Lynne’s marked up PDF. We’re going to have to push back publication by a week to give ourselves time to review and implement all her changes. She’s changed so much that the exec committee are going to want to review the whole report again.
But George from Seinfeld, though? Really?
Yes, really, because I can rely on George to leave “good enough” alone. If he gets what a sentence is trying to say, he’s not lifting a finger to change it. Proofreader George Costanza doesn’t get out of bed for less than a category 5 grammar gaffe, the kind that could make his own job harder down the line. Mistakes that could actually misinform our customers, open us up to legal problems, or get us laughed at in the press (you know, like a missing “l” in “public service”).
This close to publication, that’s the attitude you need: don’t change anything that doesn’t absolutely need to be changed.
Would George be the best proofreader out there? No. He’d be much more effective if he had Lynne Truss’s level of understanding of language. But given the choice between the two extremes, I’m giving this job to George.
Identify your Trusses and Costanzas
If you’ve got the option, you should always assign proofreading work to someone with proper training – like me! Or the Chartered Institute of Editing and Proofreading’s directory is another great place to start.
But when that’s not an option, resist the instinct to assign proofreading to your office’s biggest grammar nerd. Look for someone who’s motivated less by being right or showing off, and more by respect for the writers whose work they’re assessing, the designers who’ll have to implement their changes, and the readers who’ll never know what the proofreader saved them from.
Written by Matt Boothman, Senior Writer at Definition.
