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Big Orange Slide

Sunday, February 5th, 2012

The enemy in the ad

Culture
August 4, 2010 by Curtis Westman

Illustration by Mark Herd

Proofreading at an advertising agency is a lot like re-enacting the civil war with live ammunition. We’re among friends: we’ve watched each other marry and have children, and together we’ve experienced some of our most memorable times. Regardless, we can’t ignore the sinking feeling that one day we’ll kill each other. Thus, in case the worst should happen, consider this my final memoir.

Writing this is hard for me, you must understand, just as it is hard for anyone to boil down their craft into the thick balsamic reduction of a blog entry. At the beginning of my journey so many years ago, I pulled my red pen from the sacred stone and took up arms against typographic demons much for the same reasons other proofreaders do, not for this obvious fame and wealth, but rather for the love of the hunt itself. But the public is a ravenous, bloodthirsty mistress, and she wants to read about the dangers of proofreading.

You see, there’s a tremendous back-and-forth between proofreaders and studio artists, and proofreaders and producers, and proofreaders and art directors, and proofreaders and proofreaders. Really, we’re everyone’s worst nightmare, because no matter what we do, we’ve already made an enemy. A proof with too many mark-ups causes headaches because it delays production and affects the client’s bottom line. One with too few mark-ups causes headaches because everything has gone to hell and our superiors have to argue about whether or not waterboarding us would be in violation of the Geneva Convention.

Ultimately, it’s less painful to err on the side of caution.

That doesn’t make it easier. Ask any normal person what an advertisement is made of and they might give the obvious answer: black ink, aged moon dust and four glorious colours of powdered and rendered unicorn. But to a proofreader, those basic ingredients form complex elements to be examined. We see copy, images, a headline, and a line of legal so long that few have reached its end without descending into madness. Some say you’d have to be mad to try.

These complicated ads are a proofreader’s bread and butter. When we’re not toasting and eating them, we’re meticulously filtering out spelling and grammatical errors, checking sizes and bleeds and signing document after document in search of the fabled “perfect proof.” If we could stare at the same half-page ad all day, every day for weeks, poring over each character of every word and each pixel of every image until we were certain that there could not possibly be anything wrong with it, we would. But very few agencies are willing to hire a live-in proofreader. And those that are willing don’t have very comfortable beds.

So, eventually, we have to admit that even for divinely appointed proofreaders, perfection is unattainable, and we must hand off the ad for approval. We’ve done what we can to please the client, flirted with perfection and rode the razor’s edge between man-like passion and machine-like precision.

But we must beware; all is not well, because from that point on, we are stained with it. Like Lady Macbeth, nothing will cleanse us of what we have seen and done. Errors will occasionally happen. And we are responsible.

Short of ritual suicide, there really is nothing we can do to pay penance. As tempting as hemlock might be, the best we can do is learn from our mistakes and ensure they never happen again. We’ll continue in this way until, inevitably, we will learn everything there is to know about everything, and then we’ll simply disappear into a cloud of particulate matter that nobody really feels comfortable inhaling.

It’s a long journey, a trial-by-fire, but that is the nature of proofreading — the art of tracking and trapping and executing errors. Some people say they’ve never seen an error in the wild; others argue that they may not even exist. Trust me, my friends, the errors are out there. I’ve seen them. Waiting.

And we can’t let the errors win.

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