Hello. My name is Robin and I am a compulsive proofreader.
I can’t help it – I am the sort of person who goes through the world with a mental red pencil and underlines words, inserts carets and various other symbols (some of her own invention) and suggests alternative words, phrases or entire paragraphs. I am this (this: || ) close to becoming a vandal, because there is a piece of grafitti just across from my bus stop (hence I have to look at it every day) which is just shouting for someone to come along with a can of red spray paint: “or dreams are dieying all the time”… With such a reckless abundance of vowels in “dieying” you’d think they could have splashed out on a u for “our”, wouldn’t you? This is how bad it gets: I frequently make corrections that no one but myself will ever see to documents at work while reading them, because correcting mistakes as I read consumes less time and energy than “just” reading and ignoring mistakes.
Most of the time the only person who suffers from my affliction is myself – because I suffer in silence. I may sit there with my brain boiling with indignation or frustration, my right arm twitching, my hand reaching for the pencil, but never quite picking it up – you won’t hear a word. Every so often, though, the teacher in me takes over (I have tried to conquer her for years, but she’s a hardy one, she is) and I voice what I’m thinking, as I did today. It’s kind of rude, really. My apologies, it was kindly meant.
All this is not to say I never make mistakes myself, far from it. In fact, it’s normally when I am writing about other people’s mistakes that I make the most myself (well, excepting the times I try to type while drunk). And I justify my own meddling from the fact that I actually appreciate it when other people make me aware that I’ve made a mistake (as long as it’s done in a helpful rather than offensive manner, obviously). It’s one of the very few things I actually hit “edit post” in movable type for – correcting mistakes – whether I’ve spotted them myself or had them pointed out to me.
Voice in my head: Bob Dylan – Tangled Up in Blue