the proof of the pudding (sorry)

[devi]

Thank you all very much for your comments on my post about naming my freelance proofreading/editing website. It really helped clarify things for me. I think I'd got hung up on finding a memorable name and was stuck on "memorable = dramatic" (as marnameow said, "Fire! Melt! Extreme!", which made me laugh). Drama was the wrong thing to convey. If I was sending my precious novel off to an editor, I wouldn't want to feel that it was going to be hacked about by a frustrated-artist drama-queen. A very important part of proofing and editing is being sensitive to the writer's style and not imposing your own on it. venta made another piece fall into place for me with the words "brisk and businesslike".

So I took a completely different tack. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Friendly Pedant.

I've included the formatting/DTP kind of design in this site. The rest of my design - the stuff that warrants an artier approach - is going on a separate one. There'll be a copywriting page too when I've managed to dig out enough reviews of my writing.

Also: seriously, how much does Google Analytics rock? I can't stop refreshing it.

Edit: particularly interested in comments from people viewing it in Internet Explorer. I've used a bunch of online IE emulators on it, but I'm not very confident in what they've told me.

Comments

Friendly pedantry in reply

[jackfirecat.livejournal.com]

Looks very nice. And that's a great title.

But what's that mark-up I see? It's quite possible the ISO has moved on from when I knew it, but where's the carrots/soliduses after each mark, and full stops in circles, and colon too, are fine, but not commas or hyphens* - shld be comma with a hat to show low not high (ie not close quote)?

*(is that a hyphen - shuld have a lil hyphen mark above it in my ancient world or an n circled or m circled, and space marks...)

Proofreader I use currently is brilliant at picking up meaning issues, and having a music background he has an advantage for spotting a date may be wrong or something which other people wouldn't necessarily pick up on. And good at grammar and reading for sense. But I get frustrated that important and useful as those things are (and they should really have been picked up the copy-editor not the proofreader, but I'm grateful for him seeing them), what I really want a proofreader to do is see that SHAKESPEARE is spelt wrong in the A heading in bold large type on page 4, which he missed. Grr. And he litters the proofs with pencil queries to me rather than deciding things or writing me a list of things I need to look at, or contacting me, or the author, while he is working, if he must. The last thing I want is to have to look through all the proofs looking for his pencil queries before I return it to the typesetters.

Would you not do this?

(There's little money in it - I'm taking about 20 pages of prelims not a book, the rest being music these days. But you could add OUP to your worked-for list.)

Re: Friendly pedantry in reply

[bluedevi.livejournal.com]

Hmm, yes, good point. That's stripped-down, bastardised markup aimed at a novelist who'd never seen proofreading symbols before. I gave him a crib sheet with a guide to basic markup along with the first instalment, but ended up developing a sort of hybrid of official symbols and written notes as we went along. The fact that full stops were circled but commas and other punctuation weren't just confused him. Probably not the best page to have used in the design, now that you mention it.

But I think I would indeed spot the sort of things you're talking about in the OUP stuff. I could send you a three-page sample I recently did for someone else (it's a Word doc with Track Changes, plus a separate document summarising the document-wide changes and decisions I made) if you like?