Years ago, I had a publishing client whose boss—the owner of the publishing company, no less—thought proofreaders unnecessary. As a former journalist, he believed writers should be held accountable for their writing mistakes; that is, writers shouldn’t make any mistakes. Hence the reason this publisher had no staff proofreaders.What the owner failed to consider, aside from the fact that precious few writers are perfect, were the myriad goofs and glitches that can occur over the course of production: Copy moves, falls away, gets rekeyed by designers, changes fonts—you name it, I’ve seen it happen.
This all came back to me this morning when I opened an old issue of ARTnews magazine. Staring at me was this ad copy:
If the world tresures it, Huntington T. Block insures it.
The company was announcing its six new staff members—most of them vice presidents, none of them proofreaders. The copy is Block’s slogan and is probably on all of the company’s marketing materials.
Now most of us can be forgiving and see the typo for what it is: a mistake. After all, only one little letter dropped out, and a fairly useless one, at that (Andrew Carnegie would have been proud). We can still comprehend the meaning of the sentence.
However, there will be others who take the typo as a sign of how their art might get treated by Block: carelessly. The insurer will never know how much potential business it lost from this one omission.
Clearly, details matter. I bet no one at Huntington T. Block would dare suggest that proofreaders are unnecessary.
[Black Iris II by Georgia O’Keeffe.]
This article was originally published on Lull: Practicing Life Between the Past and the Future, 19 February 2010.
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