Proofreading: expectations vs. reality

Since the advent of the PC, the personal computer—before, long before what you know today—text-editing programs have become part of the routine of authors and proofreaders. From those early days until today, the greatest enemy of the professional proofreader, the person who studies and dedicates themselves to the work, the client, and the language, is Word’s dictionary. Why?

Identified as a tool to make the typist’s work easier, Word’s dictionary, by marking words with spelling problems with a red line and those with grammatical problems (agreement and inflection, for example), led many people to mistakenly believe that this was enough to become a proofreader, or textual proofreader, whichever term you prefer.

That, dear reader, is not enough. Imagine! That is the expectation of proofreading. That all you need to do is glance at the dictionary and check whether there are red or green “squiggly lines” underlining the words. Imagine!

Proofreading is much more than that. The reality is that it is far more complex work. In addition to checking spelling and visible errors of agreement and/or inflection, expressions such as “a maneira como”, “período de tempo”, “frente a” (in the sense of diante de), among other speech habits and “neologisms”, are part of the demanding (and delightful!) work of the proofreader.

In our opinion, the most rewarding part of proofreading is precisely when things get tangled. When the author themselves puts their heart in their hand and stains the keyboard with drops of blood. All the emotion transferred to the text complicates things. And how it complicates them!

We want to know your opinion about the prospects of proofreading work. Whether you work in the field. Whether you would like to learn more about the subject. Shall we talk? Talk to us.