Acceptions to the Rule

Some proofreading symbols used by editors.

Yesterday I made a post to Facebook, commenting about getting a notification that someone had "excepted" a friend request from me.

My friend, Andrew, who will one day be a world-renowned typographer, quickly pointed out my error.

That's what I get for not rereading (aka proofreading) my posts.  But really, who cares, it's just Facebook.

But his comment reminded me of (now) funny proofreading story from my days of printing company ownership.

I had just purchased some Macintosh computers to use for typesetting.  They were cutting edge at the time and I was so pleased that that software included a spellchecker.  We would never need to proofread by hand again!

We quickly cranked out a couple of jobs, including an annual banquet program for the local Ducks Unlimited chapter, listing the hundred or so items they would be selling at the silent auction during the Saturday evening event.

Monday morning, I had the D.U. Local Chapter President standing in my office SCREAMING at me. "How could you do this? There were families at our banquet."

Bewildered, I had to ask what he was talking about.

Then he showed me one of the auction items listed in the banquet program, which we had not manually proofread because of our wonderful new spell checker.

The item was suppose to read: Hand-carved Wooden Duck.

I quickly learned that spell checkers (at that time) only found words that are spelled incorrectly. And the error was actually a correctly spelled word.

You see, on the keyboard, the U and the I are right next to one another.

Needless to say, we again started proofreading our materials before sending them to press.

You might find typos and errors in grammar at BareNakedBill.blogspot.com