The letter from Michelle Covert of Melbourne was very polite and very to the point.
“What has driven this newspaper-reading member of the public to take up her pen and complain?” she asked me. “Grammar, sir, grammar.”
With that, Covert ran down a list of mistakes she had found in the newspaper along with two marked-up clippings to prove her point. Prove it she unquestionably did.
“Do editors no longer edit? Do schools of journalism no longer teach the elements of good writing?” she said. Journalists, she went on, “need to take better care of the very thing to which they owe their livelihoods!”
I don’t know what Covert does for a living, but her knowledge of language and sharp eyes tell me she would probably make a good editor. That’s why I wish she had been among a group of guest proofreaders who recently visited the newsroom.
The readers responded to a column by news editor Steve Arnold, who invited anyone interested to work a few nights alongside copy desk editors, a job I think is the toughest in the building.
They give stories a final read after other editors have checked them, write headlines, lay out pages and then proof the pages before the newspaper goes to press. And they do it all against unbending deadlines.
We had some guest proofreaders visit two years ago, and it proved valuable enough for both participants and editors that we thought we should repeat it.
“We felt it was time to re-engage the public, to give people who have a strong feeling about the newspaper a chance to see what we do and how we do it,” says Arnold.
“I think we gain a certain amount of good will by doing it, that we’re open and honest and they see us, warts and all. They’re given the opportunity, to a certain extent, to walk a mile in our shoes.”
Four readers volunteered: Ken Campbell, a former vice president with Titan Systems Corp. in Melbourne; Hal Gettings, a retired media relations expert with Martin Marietta; Wendy Haddad, a Melbourne writer; and Ted Wansley, a former commercial diver and current student.
They looked at about eight pages a night for four nights. The pages contained stories written by staff members, as well as pages with wire service stories, and all found the same kind of mistakes that torment Covert.
“There were a lot of different grammatical errors, confusing sentences. They were commas where they shouldn’t be, making things more confusing to read,” says Haddad. “I was really surprised about that because I guess it had gone through other proofreaders.”
“There was everything from bad syntax to just plain typos,” says Gettings, which shows why he not only believes in Murphy’s Law, “but I think Murphy is an optimist.”
Gettings also noticed something else. As issues become more complex, especially those that involve science, he says there must be more specialization among the reporters and editors who handle them.
“You get into technical areas now, and it’s esoteric,” he says.
Despite the grammatical mistakes, the proofreaders say they were impressed with the professionalism they saw and surprised at the pressure copy editors face at night as they put out three editions.
“I certainly became a bit more sympathetic about running a newspaper,” says Campbell. “I think there’s some very good writers there, and that you’re in a time crunch with deadlines and sometimes things slip through that people would expect you to catch.
“I left with a genuine appreciation that editors are really trying to improve the newspaper. It was important for me to see that.”
Says Gettings: “It’s still amazing to me that something like this gets done every day.”
Wansley, meantime, says he found the work of our reporters to be “good journalism, straight-forward, unbiased, objective.”
Arnold immediately went over the corrected pages with copy editors, discussed what was found and got the mistakes fixed.
“It’s an eye-opening experience for them (the visitors), and it’s an eye-opening experience for copy editors who rarely get a chance to meet the public,” he said. “It puts a human face on the people we’re serving.”
