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Become a Suite101 Copyeditor!

© Barbara Nicholson Bell

I've had an interesting experience in the last couple of days. I accepted a freelance job to do some proofreading for a local company, which provides the packaging inserts used in some prescriptions drugs. You know, the information that is included with your medicine which tells you the side effects, the tests that were conducted, proper dosage, etc. The print is very tiny, but it must be absolutely accurate and meet US FDA standards. The texts that I had to proofread were actually instructions to the physicians who would be administering the drugs, which are even more detailed and complicated than those we are used to seeing.

Before I could begin the job, I had to pass a Proofreader's Test. I was feeling a little smug - after all, I've been proofreading most of my life in various jobs, and I wrote the Copyeditor's Course for SuiteU. I pride myself on my ability to spell, recognize grammatical errors, and mistakes in punctuation. In fact, I was about to be rudely surprised!

This test was six pages, and there was no time limit. In the first section, I had to identify some simple typographical errors. In the second section, there were two texts identical to each other, but I had to find the errors in the second example and mark them using "standard proofreader's marks." Hmmm...at Suite101 we do not use proofreader's marks, because our corrections are made directly into the text. This is a skill I once had, but have forgotten over the years. However, using my red pen, I could identify the errors and at least mark them so that the test-scorer would know that I had found them.

The third section listed common spelling traps, and I had to choose the correctly spelled word from sets of three.

The fourth section asked me to choose the appropriate word to complete a sentence, to ascertain whether I understood the context.

The last section listed about a dozen words which were spelled phonetically. I needed to spell the words correctly.

After I completed all the sections I turned the test in to the scorer, a young lady named Michelle. She admitted she used a "cheat sheet" to grade the test, which made me feel a little smug...surely I'd gotten a perfect score.

Wrong! I missed two spelling words from the phonetics section, and missed three errors in the side-by-side texts. Aaarrggh...

Our Copyeditor's Course at SuiteU is a different sort of experience. It's intended to provide guidelines for our copyeditors when they proofread the articles posted each month by our editors. At the end of the course is a short exam, which consists of a one-paragraph anecdote with a number of errors. The student must find and correct all the errors, achieving at least a 70% score, in order to receive a Certificate of Completion.