the internship, part six

October 26th, 2007

Probably the hardest part about the editing internship, for me, was watching myself make mistakes. Errors from the first few weeks didn’t bother me that much; errors from the last few weeks did. The week of Thanksgiving, with just over three weeks left in my assignment, the legal department asked me to do a printer proof check on a book. Printer proof checks usually required an hour or less of time; mainly, I would compare the company hard copy against the printer’s proof. I followed a checklist: made sure running heads match chapter titles, double checked that TOC page numbers matched text, etc. And Brenda and Linda had clearly explained that with printer proofs, the goal was to find few mistakes because the company would pay per change.

While I was comparing the table of contents with the proof page numbers, I noticed the headings had lowercased words like “above,” “if,” and sometimes “which.” Since those words should technically be capitalized in titles (CMS 8.167), I marked and flagged the pages. Sometime after flagging the tenth mistake, I wondered if capitalization wasn’t a big deal when checking a printer proof. I should’ve emailed Brenda to check, but I didn’t.

I finished the project, left it on the appropriate designer’s desk, and went to lunch. When I returned, I found an email from Brenda waiting for me: “Let me know when you get back. I need to talk to you about some of the changes you made on the printer proof.”

That didn’t sound good. I responded, and in minutes she was at my desk, printer proof in hand. “Oooh Kayy,” she exclaimed, dropping the manuscript in front of me. “I think we need to go over the whole concept of the printer proof again.”

Brenda reminded me that checking a printer proof means marking only glaring errors—misspellings, incorrect chapter titles, that kind of thing. Capitalization mistakes, bad hyphenation—those are things that would’ve been great to catch at the proofreading stage, but they aren’t worth the cost to correct now.

I felt like a complete idiot. Months into the internship, I was making major mistakes—major enough to fluster Brenda and warrant a rebuke. My ego wounded, I apologized and inwardly vowed to be more careful.