proofreading

I hope the pics below give you an idea of what it's like for me to proofread yet another error-riddled manuscript. We were suddenly assigned a proofreading job of the "needs to be done yesterday" variety (other departments can never decide whether or when to use the books we create until they belatedly realize that, Oh! We need this textbook right away!), so I've been slaving away over this manuscript, which I just finished proofing tonight. 

Click to enlarge, then right-click on the image and select "open in new tab" to see full size:

Every Post-It note = a page with one or more errors on it.

I realized that, since I was putting a Post-It note on practically every page of the manuscript, there was really no reason to use Post-Its at all. But the sunk-cost fallacy had gripped me by that point, so I continued wasting Post-Its to the bitter end.

an example of a page full of errors

As I make corrections, I leave notes, often in Korean for the benefit of our designer, whose English is shakier than my Korean (this shakiness is also the inadvertent source of many of the errors I have to correct*). This particular manuscript is about 180 pages long. I'm coming in over the weekend to work on the companion manuscript, which is even longer. (But, as my boss reassures me, it's mostly filled with blank spaces so that students can write paragraphs and essays. Yay?) The main manuscript took five work days to get through. I have to get through the companion manuscript before Monday, i.e., in two days. In publishing, deadline is king, and there's no denying the deadline.

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*My boss, my former American coworker, and I (it's down to just my boss and me now) all generate content for whatever textbook we're working on. We look over our work, then give it to the designer, who has to transfer our content from MS Word to InDesign, the program he uses to generate a polished textbook. The designer formats and colors the pages (thereby creating templates). He also draws certain illustrations, add photos, and works on text formatting, which has to be consistent from chapter to chapter and book to book. The designer then prints out a copy of the manuscript for me to proofread. 

Unfortunately, the designer's way of transferring Word text to InDesign is clunky: instead of copying all of a page's content at one time without losing its format, he creates dozens of individual text boxes per page, then meticulously copies bits of text over sentence by sentence, manually re-applying formats to the text as he goes. It's an inefficient process that results in all sort of designer-generated errors. Periods and whole words or phrases get dropped. Material from previous chapters gets copied and pasted into the wrong exercises; text formatting (italics, bold, etc.) gets fucked up... it's a mess. I need to sit down with the designer and show him there's a way to copy an entire page of text with the original formatting intact. This would cut down on at least 50% of the errors I have to deal with. It would also save oodles of time, and proofreading would be so much easier.