When it comes to publications, paranoia’s healthy! Our handy hints range from interviewing to proof reading. Huge thanks to Brian Jeavons (brian@summersault.co.uk) from Summersault Communications in Leamington Spa who has handed over his Paranoid’s Guide to Proof Checking, which is chock full of handy hints for anyone new to producing publications.
It works on the principle that ‘paranoia is an essential ingredient for a healthy communication professional’. It seems that when you’re putting a publication together, whoever runs Murphy’s Law (anything that can go wrong will go wrong) is taking a very keen interest…
At the interview stage, have you checked:
- Spellings, especially of names – John Smith could be Jon Smithe
- Job titles, departments, etc
- Figures and dates
- Proper names of organisations, awards, etc
- Phone numbers
- Whether you understand what the interviewee has told you? If you don’t understand, ask – if you don’t know what’s happening, how can you possibly explain it to your readers?
- Next – writing. To save space, I’m going to make the assumption – and it’s a big one – that you’ve transcribed your notes accurately. So, what else should you be looking out for?
- The publication’s style guide
- Hyphens
- Should something be singular or plural? For example, should it be: the team is or the team are?
- Things that the spellchecker won’t pick up – for example, words that sound the same but have different spellings and meanings (complement/compliment; discrete/discreet)
- Consistency of spellings – I’ve appeared as Brian and Brain in the same article, thankfully it wasn’t written by me!
If you’re sending out copy to contributors, the next stage is to get their amends. In an ideal world, your writing will be so wonderful it will be cleared with no changes. In practice you will either get a fax with hand-written amends in terrible writing; 250 words carefully extended to 4,000; misspellings or the person who carefully uppercases all job titles when your style guide says they’re lower case.
Some people re-type an entire article when they’ve changed three words, which is fine if you’re working electronically and the story hasn’t been put on page, less so if they’ve faxed it through as you will have to play ‘spot the changes’.
If you’re working via email, Word’s track changes is very useful – but watch the spacing between words, it can alter.
At proof stage:
- Look at the spreads for juxtapositioning of stories and headlines, if you’re printing cut-out coupons or forms, check what they back onto
- Does copy flow well around photos or cut outs? Check the spacing of words for big gaps in a row or one word spread across a column
- Does a hyphenated word run over a column? It shouldn’t Try to avoid one line of a paragraph starting or ending a column
- Make sure captions marry up with photos and that people who should be in the picture haven’t been cropped out
- If a credit is required on a photo, make sure it’s there
- If the photo has been flipped, check there are no words reading the wrong way
- Check that the issue date and number on the front cover is correct.
And a final word to the wise. If you have a missing caption, type XXXX – there are plenty of stories about national publications where people have written ‘will someone write some sh*t in here please’ and it’s been overlooked… |
