This week, I completed the Society for Editing and Proofreading (SfEP) proofreading mentoring programme, the final module of the SfEP’s proofreading training. As with the two previous modules (which, it should be noted, have since been restructured into a total of three courses), in this post I’d like to briefly summarise what others considering the course can expect and what I got out of it.
(The course has a simple structure: I was assigned a mentor with relevant interests and experience, who then sent me six exercises to complete followed by very detailed feedback on each one (this process all took place via email rather than face to face). The exercises, which came from real-life proofreading projects, were quite varied in terms of their content, difficulty and the style of mark-up we were supposed to use (including MS Word track changes, PDF mark-up and BSI symbols). One thing I had not realised from the course description is that standard exercises are used for all mentees, rather than the mentors assigning texts from their own work on an individual basis as I had expected. I came to understand the rationale behind this (it ensures a consistent level and a tried-and-tested selection of texts), but it did initially raise the question of just how the proofreading mentoring would differ from the advanced proofreading course (P2), which also consisted of a series of standard exercises with the opportunity to ask questions of the course leader. (Edited to add: apparently, there is in fact scope for the texts which are set to be customised, though in my case the standard texts were already a very good fit for me. There was even an academic text with lots of German mixed in!)
The two main differences are, firstly, the level of difficulty and, secondly, the level of feedback. Like with P2, this course opened with a “proofread against copy” exercise, but this time with multiple versions of texts annotated rather unclearly by different people and the instruction to mark up the final proofs in no fewer than three different colours. The challenges came not just from tricky issues within the texts themselves, but also from ambiguous briefs, terrible handwriting, long idiosyncratic style sheets and context-specific conventions. It was a definite step up in difficulty, and much more time-consuming (it took me a total of nearly six months to complete the mentoring alongside my full-time work). For each exercise, I then received not merely a model answer, but detailed feedback and discussion on decisions I’d taken, corrections I should (or shouldn’t) have made and general considerations I might not have been aware of. My mentor was also happy to respond to further questions both before and after each exercise, and was very friendly and good-humoured throughout. There were, inevitably, a few mistakes I kicked myself afterwards for having made, though I could console myself that I did also spot a few errors in the texts that almost no other mentees (and in one case not even the mentoring director!) had picked up.
Overall, I found it a very helpful and stimulating process. Although, as my mentor explained at the start, the course is typically aimed at people with rather less experience of proofreading (I first started just under ten years ago), given my route into this area of work via translation rather than proofreading proper and the lack of external feedback I get on my work, I found it valuable to be able to put my skills to the test and have the opportunity to explore questions of how to approach texts. I was also hoping to build up my own confidence about my proofreading decision-making, which I did to an extent, though one of the main pieces of feedback I received was precisely that I ought to be more confident about making certain changes! But – and here’s the rub – at the same time as a proofreader you have to hold back from making too many changes, and need to be able to judge when and when not to change (translators face precisely the same dilemma of course: when to be faithful and when to deviate from the source text).
So I can recommend the course to anyone wishing to develop their own proofreading skills, especially those who don’t tend to get much feedback on their own work. It would be great to have a similar structured course for translators too, though of course we have the disadvantage that there would need to be different courses for all the different language combinations.
The two main differences are, firstly, the level of difficulty and, secondly, the level of feedback. Like with P2, this course opened with a “proofread against copy” exercise, but this time with multiple versions of texts annotated rather unclearly by different people and the instruction to mark up the final proofs in no fewer than three different colours. The challenges came not just from tricky issues within the texts themselves, but also from ambiguous briefs, terrible handwriting, long idiosyncratic style sheets and context-specific conventions. It was a definite step up in difficulty, and much more time-consuming (it took me a total of nearly six months to complete the mentoring alongside my full-time work). For each exercise, I then received not merely a model answer, but detailed feedback and discussion on decisions I’d taken, corrections I should (or shouldn’t) have made and general considerations I might not have been aware of. My mentor was also happy to respond to further questions both before and after each exercise, and was very friendly and good-humoured throughout. There were, inevitably, a few mistakes I kicked myself afterwards for having made, though I could console myself that I did also spot a few errors in the texts that almost no other mentees (and in one case not even the mentoring director!) had picked up.
Overall, I found it a very helpful and stimulating process. Although, as my mentor explained at the start, the course is typically aimed at people with rather less experience of proofreading (I first started just under ten years ago), given my route into this area of work via translation rather than proofreading proper and the lack of external feedback I get on my work, I found it valuable to be able to put my skills to the test and have the opportunity to explore questions of how to approach texts. I was also hoping to build up my own confidence about my proofreading decision-making, which I did to an extent, though one of the main pieces of feedback I received was precisely that I ought to be more confident about making certain changes! But – and here’s the rub – at the same time as a proofreader you have to hold back from making too many changes, and need to be able to judge when and when not to change (translators face precisely the same dilemma of course: when to be faithful and when to deviate from the source text).
So I can recommend the course to anyone wishing to develop their own proofreading skills, especially those who don’t tend to get much feedback on their own work. It would be great to have a similar structured course for translators too, though of course we have the disadvantage that there would need to be different courses for all the different language combinations.
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