An apt way to celebrate National proofreading day
A couple of weekends back, yours truly had the immense pleasure of meeting, and consequently, drinking with some colleagues. One of them, a gifted and well-read art director (yes, they exist), happened to have been subjected to the abject displeasure of encountering a “your” instead of “you’re”. That too, inserted with quite the nonchalance, in official correspondence. Said colleague’s feelings went from mild annoyance at the beginning, to utter disbelief that the perpetrator of this grammatical offence had never heard of a Wren & Martin’s High School English Grammar and Composition, and towards the end of the session, a slurred speech-filled rage at “this nincompoop who doesn’t know his head from his behind, let alone the correct usage of apostrophes.”
On the way back home, I couldn’t help but think about all the ‘should of’ I had read in place of ‘should have’, missed and misplaced commas, worn-out exclamation marks hanging around a paragraph like those aimless kids at a corner cigarette shop and their ilk. And I wondered, is Wren & Martin’s High School English Grammar and Composition even relevant in today’s world where social media gurus hand out hash-tagged insights like “people don’t read, they skim”? I remember my school days, where a certain hot-tempered teacher never taught us the lessons and poems. His logic? You have your tuition classes and guides for that. He went straight to the last pages of each chapter – the grammar. And may the Heavenly Father and His Virgin Mother have mercy on your soul if you messed up there. He was what in today’s terms is known as a Grammar Nazi. I owe whatever little sense I have about those little squiggles that occupy the lines we read to this teacher and a few like him.
Like every writer approaching middle age, or more so, a mid-life crisis, I too grumble at the total lack of respect for the rules of language. Punctuation marks are there for a purpose, to paint a picture in the mid of the reader. Six words in a headline on a social media post (that’s the norm/mandate, right, as per performance metrics?) or between six hundred in an article like this, these little black marks add meaning, give a pause, make the reader feel. They hold the entire thing together, like the knots made at the right place in a knitted wool piece. And they deserve their rightful place.
Which brings me to the purpose of this long-winded ramble.
8th March is National Proofreading Day. Why have a day to ‘proofreading’? And what in the blazes is proofreading anyway?
For the uninitiated, a proofreader is like a gatekeeper, someone who is employed in any organization that earns its (without the apostrophe, mind you) bread and butter from the printed word – newspapers, magazines, publishing houses, advertising agencies. A proofreader weeds out errors in punctuation, grammar, syntax and makes the final judgement to make the piece printable. Now, one would argue, print is dead, who reads papers and books anymore, and so on. But words are being written and read every single day. On social media, on Kindles, blogs. People are reading. And it is someone’s job to make them read right.
To align the askew.
And yes, if you thought something was wrong with the headline of this blog, your goddamn right.