08 Oct Brisbane proofreader, Brisbane clients – the face-to-face benefits
Why meet your proofreader face-to-face? Surely, proofreading is just an abstract technical skill. Surely, it’s just hunting errors, fixing punctuation and making sure the page numbers commence at 1 and proceed in the conventional manner. Surely, English is interchangeable worldwide and finding a proficient practitioner is simply about who is cheapest. Surely? Nope.
If you’re a business in Brisbane that has something it wants proofread, there are real benefits to working with a proofreader who is also in Brisbane. Someone you can sit down with over a coffee.
Yes, proofreading is a technical skill, but it also has a large “consultancy” component. As such, it requires both you and your proofreader to have a working dialogue. It’s like any client-consultant relationship. It requires engagement, attention and rapport. Or, to give it the more usual buzzword term: ensuring you are on the same “wavelength”. Brisbane has its own wavelength.
The vibe of the thing
You already know the most effective way to know, like and trust a provider is the meet and greet. It’s how you sound them out and it’s how they get to grips with you. This second part – them dialling into your vibe – is surprisingly crucial in proofreading, whether it is a short article or full-length book manuscript.
So, yes, while much of proofreading is a purely technical exercise of enforcing remorseless lexical precision, there is actually a fair bit of interpretation. Many judgement calls to make. This is where the my-way-or-the-highway rules of grammar must take second place to readability, i.e. anticipating how your words will be interpreted/decoded by the reader so that your meaning gets across.
If your proofreader does not get the best possible sense of what you’re trying to communicate and how you’re seeking to communicate it, they’re not providing a “professional service” per se: they are providing a function – some kind of coffee-powered version of the spell checker in Microsoft Word. You will not be getting the best from them.
So, let’s look at some more of the most important aspects of this whole face-to-face issue.
Consultation, conventions and conversation
Consultation drives cohesion. Done poorly, consultation is just a way to turn a budget into hot air. Done well, it calibrates the project, problem and provider into a sleek solution. It leads to deeper understanding, unlocks insights, sets boundaries and can even turn your provider into a source of contacts.
Whether you need a local proofreader depends largely on where your readership will be. It makes sense: if you’re selling local, then use comms professionals who can “speak local” (as we have blogged about before). It’s rare that you’ll need “proofreading” in its most pure sense without needing to “consult” with the proofreader. If you do, that means you’ve already got the messaging, strategy, researching, writing and editing steps sewn up. However, in our experience, these steps are never entirely self-contained to a degree that you can hotswap your suppliers without causing upset to the overall project.
Set the scene and set the pace
When you sit across the boardroom or cafe table from a prospective supplier, you can get a good sense of their professionalism. After all, you’ll be relying on this person to do something you can’t. And the evidence of their skill is that there will be no evidence: you, as the client, won’t be able to detect the errors they’ve fixed. Yes, if you review their working drafts, you’ll see a morass of edits, but the finished product should be like a professionally cleaned window: so clean it vanishes.
As such, you have to be able to trust your proofreader. The key question is, do you? After all, allowing your work to be critiqued always feels confronting – so it matters who that person is. The more confidence you can have in them, the more faith you will have in what they do to your words and why they did it that way.
So, the initial meeting and briefing often frames an entire working relationship. It’s the forum where you can get feedback and ask questions in the most effective manner. Especially with long projects, proofreading is a collaborative undertaking between an author trying to say something new and a “quality control” professional making sure that those new things stay readable.
Miscommunications are resolved faster
When you meet face-to-face, there is a reduced chance of miscommunication. Relying on emails causes confusion – often because the very means you are using to communicate is the thing you want help with. That is, you (the writer) are writing (via email) to liaise with someone (the proofreader) about the issues in your writing (the rough draft of your document). Yes, video calls can help – you can at least see who you are talking to – but there is still a “barrier”. The effectiveness of sitting side-by-side with someone and looking at the same document – on a screen or even printed out – is unmatched for “getting on the same page”, because, literally, you are.
Handshakes and pieces of paper still matter
Speaking of pages: paper still matters. Yep, old-school ink-on-paper documents. When you meet face-to-face, you can hand your documents over, write on them, cross things out, draw arrows, make sketches, rearrange page orders, sketch out diagrams. A good editorial meeting might end up with a sheaf of papers that is a mass of scribblings, notes, folds and red pen slashes. Through capturing and encoding everyone’s thoughts into that messy chook-scratch, those physical few pieces of paper become one central and unarguable artefact of “truth”. When you’re catching something as ephemeral and flexible as your thoughts and freezing them into the cold reality of written language, creating fixed points like this is highly effective.
Rules of thumb
Like any professional service, the personal “fit”of supplier and customer underpins a lot of the effectiveness of the engagement. Proofreading, while ostensibly a solely technical skill, still has a soft side and it makes effective headway through every practitioner’s rules of thumb. These are largely the same from one professional proofreader to the next, but these rules differ in how they interconnect and overlap. And, crucially, in which ones take precedence when there is a conflict or squirrely problem. That is, proofreaders’ skills might be interchangeable, but their individual approaches won’t be. They might create perfect text, but text can be perfect in different ways.
Secret: there is no such thing as perfect long-form text. Once you get past a few hundred words, no chunk of verbiage is ever 100% error-free. Oftentimes, this is because of how you define “error” anyway. For example, in the previous sentence, I used “oftentimes”, a word I consider wrong because it means exactly the same thing as “often”. I believe that shorter is better. So, that’s my “rule of thumb”, but how much is rule and how much is thumb?
When things go wrong
Mistakes and misapprehensions always occur! Like any specialist technician, proofreaders have a habit of focusing intently on their area of competence while letting other aspects of professionalism go to seed. Things such as keeping you updated, keeping deadlines in check and keeping aware of how their special skill fits into the larger project. All of these issues – and many more – are less stressful when you have an in-person relationship with your “editorial quality control” supplier. If they hit a snag in their error-correction (it’s pretty common in technical proofreading to need the advice of a subject matter expert – such as a specifically trained engineer; accessing this person for an answer can take a long time and crash the whole project) you have the interpersonal latitude to work through a solution.
Brisbane businesses meeting their advisors and suppliers face to face
When you engage a proofreader, you’re asking them to do a specific task within the overall goal of improving the quality and clarity of communication. Specifically, turning a piece of your written material into something that can be more easily absorbed by someone else. As such, they need to have the maximum “quality and clarity of communication” with you before they do it for you.
What all this boils down to is common sense. When you’re a local trying to produce marketing material for locals, it makes sense to use proofreaders who you can brief in most effectively. And that proofreader will be the one you can sit down with over a cup of coffee.
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