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Hi, Laura! Please can you tell us a bit about the nature of your freelance business?

Comma Chameleon Proofreading arose from a love of language crossed with the stubborn determination to weed out any and all imperfections – and, I suppose, a cheeky appreciation for Culture-Club-based puns!

I have a BA in English Literature, English Language and Drama and an MA in Literature, so my strengths lie predominantly within these fields, although I also have qualifications in Psychology and Philosophy of Religion, so am very comfortable with the themes broached and the terminology used in these areas.

I currently focus solely on proofreading, although I may expand into copywriting in future; I have experience of writing a monthly column, as well as maintaining my own Comma Chameleon blog.

Tell us about your journey to becoming a freelancer.

I must admit I did rather fall into the world of freelance proofreading. I used to proofread university assignments for friends and family (they paid me in cake/pizza – what can I say? Chameleons love their carbs!), but hadn’t known how to pursue it as a career.

I was working at an independent screen-printing shop in Birmingham (www.getagripstudio.co.uk) when a musician-cum-freelance-proofreader came to get some T-shirts printed for his concert tour; we got chatting, he offered to recommend me as a proofreader to an editorial company that uses freelancers, and the rest is history! I’ve been slowly but surely growing my business since then.

What do you enjoy most about running your own business?

I enjoy the flexibility of being able to set my own working hours around my other obligations, but mostly I really enjoy the warm fuzzy feeling I get when a client is grateful for my help. So many people lack confidence in their writing, but it is great to be able to help them, not only by correcting their mistakes but by offering constructive suggestions and making comments on their work. It is also quite rewarding, when clients return with a new document to be proofread, to see that they have taken my suggestions on board and improved their writing as a result.

What are the downsides to working for yourself, if any, and how do you overcome them?

The risk of procrastination. My pencil case is veritably full to bursting with the promise of fun ways to while away the whole day (who knew building a pen-lid tower could be so rewarding?) and my office space is unwisely full of distractions (note to self: remove ukulele from eye line to avoid temptation to bash out a few [ear-crushingly painful] chords in homage to early-90s grunge. This is bad on so many levels…).

I actually tend to overcome the procrastination issue by giving in to the urges, allowing myself to get distracted for a set time before returning to work, now purged of my inexplicable need to compose a pencil-shavings-based reproduction of the Mona Lisa and free to focus on the task at hand. A clear mind is essential for thorough, detailed proofreading.

How do you go about promoting your business/finding clients?

In addition to appearing on Find a Proofreader, I have a website (www.commachameleonproofreading.co.uk), a Tumblr account (comma-chameleon-proofreading.tumblr.com) and a Facebook page (www.facebook.com/Comma.Chameleon.Proofreading).

What is your most treasured work-related possession?

My mouse! I was without it for a day recently, and having to use the toggle thingamajig on my laptop was a real exercise in frustration. I guess I’m just too old-school for all this new (i.e. post-twentieth-century) technology. Google and the OED are both also infinitely useful.

What do you enjoy doing when you’re not working with words?

I’m currently learning to play the ukulele. It’s not quite as aurally traumatising as listening to a child demonstrating his new violin, but it’s close. I mostly stick to quieter pursuits involving cake and pottery (although, lately, my attempts on the pottery wheel have resulted in some rather shrill ululations of frustration – and a large pile of botched pots).

What’s your favourite book?

My favourite book is not a literary classic; it is called Each Peach Pear Plum and is a children’s book written by Janet and Allan Ahlberg. My great-grandad read it to me as a child, and I recently passed on a copy (not my original copy, mind – that’s far too precious!) to my niece.

As far as books aimed at the more discerning reader are concerned, while I enjoy the novels of Charlotte Bronte, Bram Stoker and Mary Shelley, among other classic authors, I am very much a Stephen King fan. Currently on my bedside table are King’s new novel Joyland, George R. R. Martin’s Game of Thrones, and Khaled Hosseini’s A Thousand Splendid Suns.

Have you got any advice for aspiring freelancers?

Be patient. Building up your business will take time. Don’t underestimate the influence of word of mouth; if a client is happy with your work, their recommendation will go a long way towards their colleagues/friends/classmates choosing to use your services. Likewise, reviews and testimonials are massively influential.

Laura Proudman is a freelance proofreader based in Birmingham. She proofreads and edits for students, businesses and authors and is the owner of Comma Chameleon Proofreading. You can view her Find a Proofreader listing here. 

Introduction – Checking APA and Harvard citations

I want to talk to you about references — the bibliographic sort that almost every academic paper and book contains at the end — and citations, the callouts for their reference partners. They’re not even a new invention, so at the dawn of the 21st century, I remember thinking: “Why have I had to check these for so long? Why hasn’t anyone tried to make it easier to check them?” I’d sought in vain to find a simple and affordable program to help with checking references and citations. In the information age, there must be something out there to do this, but my searches drew a blank. There were a small number of in-house and commercially available programs to work on references, but these seemed prohibitively expensive, inflexible, and restrictive in their functionality. Most seemed to be bibliographic authoring software to help authors compile reference lists and citations as they prepared their work prior to submission for publication, but none provided a simple solution to check references and citations after the text had been written.

Challenges

With a growing number of in-house and freelance copy-editors, there seemed to be a niche in the market for this type of software. After lengthy discussions with a programmer colleague, we came up with the name “ReferenceChecker” with the following desiderata:

• It should be affordable
• It should be easy to install and use, with minimum prior knowledge of using add-ins in Word
• It should be flexible yet require minimum input from the user
• It should be fast to use
• Its user interface should be clean, simple, and easy to understand
• It should present clear results and point the user directly to the exact place in the text where the discrepancies can be found
• It should understand the character sets of most European languages, including letters with diacritics that are variations on letters in the Latin alphabet
• It should recognize and check the most commonly used referencing systems, APA, Harvard, and Vancouver, and their numerous variants.

Could all this be done? Would it prove too much for a machine, to be able to carry out the manual checking tasks of an experienced copy-editor? We set about programming the code, testing, retesting, and reconfiguring the code many times to produce a working prototype. It worked in the early stages, and with the variety of examples of references and citations, but we soon found variants of names, years, punctuation, ordering, and so on that would warrant revisions to the software. Testing and development took about 5 months; finally, in early 2005, we were ready to unleash the beast into the Wild World Web.

It has been a considerable challenge, though not insurmountable, to iron out problems along the way. Things arose that we didn’t think would arise, and there were less-than-straightforward elements in bibliographic referencing that would require sophisticated code. Talking of code, the software comprises a Visual Basic application implemented in several thousand lines of code. Its size and complexity belie its simple interface and experience for the user; the user shouldn’t have to worry about how big or complex the software is, only how quick and easy it is to use.

Throughout its development, we introduced a number of additional useful features in ReferenceChecker:

• hyperlinked results that could be clicked on or scrolled through to take the user to the exact place in the text where the mismatch was found: either a reference item with no matching citation or a citation with no matching item in the reference list;
• the option to check with or without case sensitivity in author names;
• a feature to copy and paste the results;
• the option to view the results as a list of either (a) every single citation and reference item listed and checked or (b) mismatches only.

21st-century editing

In conceiving the idea for ReferenceChecker, I admit I had a few qualms. Would the “brain” of a machine perform as accurately and intelligently in this case as the brain of a human? When a human checks references and citations, they have learned how to recognize and compare the separate elements that constitute each reference and citation. My underlying apprehension was that if software could do the amount of work that would normally take a human, say, 15 minutes in an average-sized paper in a small fraction of the time, i.e. a few seconds, could this open a Pandora’s box of expectations? The answer is quite complex. By using, and still being in full control of, software to check the parts of a text that can be processed more quickly than by the laborious manual method, the copy-editor can concentrate on other, more important tasks that cannot be done by a machine, while maintaining a high level of accuracy. We’re still a long way off from machines being able to do the complete work of a copy-editor on a text, because of the vast complexities of human written language. With automated grammar, consistency, spell-checking, and text-analysis software, there are frequently false errors highlighted, because the software hasn’t been programmed to “look around” either side of a word or phrase to detect and understand the specific context and meaning intended by the author. In some cases, the software can’t possibly know if a spelling or punctuation is correct or not in a specific context, because it doesn’t have a human’s life experience.

Some examples:

• “man eating shark” or “man-eating shark”? Which is correct in the context of the subject matter? Either could be used, depending on the context. Should the software flag either of these as being incorrect?
• “It’s one mistake” or “Its one mistake”? Either could be correct, with or without the apostrophe, depending on the surrounding text.
• “… his parents, John Allen, and Rose Wood” or “… his parents, John Allen and Rose Wood”? Does this refer to two or four people? It could be either.
• “principal was investigated” or “principle was investigated”? Either is acceptable, but would it be appropriate for an automated checker to question the usage of either of these? Would it be remiss for it not to report a possible spelling error?

We encountered a few challenges while developing ReferenceChecker, and to deal with these, several sets of rules were implemented. There were rules to detect references and citations; rules to parse the references and citations; and rules to extract author surnames and years of publication. A number of “post-processing rules” were then incorporated to clean up the extracted references and citations, ignore spurious names, and make sense of all surnames and years of publication. A final set of rules compared references and citations, and generated the list of mismatches for the user to look through. In so doing, ReferenceChecker has been developed with intelligent design, working in a way as close as possible to how a human would recognize references and citations, that is, if it looks like a citation or reference to the human eye, ReferenceChecker will recognize and check it. It’s heartening to know we’ve saved many people many hours of working time, and to receive feedback and suggestions from our users. For the average full-time copy-editor, who might work on, say, 15 average-sized papers in a working week (e.g. 30 pages of A4 with five pages of references), and estimating about 15 minutes of reference-checking time per paper, we’ve calculated time savings of up to 174 working hours per year—that’s almost five working weeks!

About the author

Paul Sensecall is a full-time freelance (www.pseditorialservices.com) with over 20 years’ experience of copy-editing and proofreading academic material in the areas of science, technical, medical; social sciences and humanities. 

Hi, Louise! Can you tell us a bit about the nature of your business?

I’m a journalist by trade and I still write, although not so much these days. Mostly I edit – everything from books to websites and brochures – and I provide services from basic on-screen proofreading to structural editing and consultation. My specialist subjects are finance of all sorts and adult material – I’m increasingly working for self-publishers, especially those writing erotica, alongside a core clientele of financial institutions and traditional publishers.

Tell us about your journey to becoming a freelancer.

I moved into sub-editing some 12 years into my journalism career. During a long spell abroad I ended up working as an in-house editor at a major investment bank, but even before that I found I was being asked more and more to edit other people’s work written in English because of being a native speaker and having the skills. After I returned to the UK I decided to freelance instead of searching for an elusive staff job. It was necessity rather than choice but turned out to be a good decision.

What do you enjoy most about running your own business?

Where to start? I like having total control over my own time. I’m not a slave to the daily commute, I can take time off when I want (even if it’s just a half-day), I don’t need to ask a boss for time off to go to the dentist or wait in for a plumber, the postie knows I work from home so I’m always in for parcels… And on top of all that, I get to choose what work I want to take on.

What are the downsides to working for yourself, if any, and how do you overcome them?

Like a lot of freelances, I’m prone to cabin fever. Working alone at home means that if you’re not careful you can go for days without having proper human contact. I’ve tried working once in a while at a co-working space but I find it too distracting and I can’t play music, which I like to stream in the background. I get round the solitude by ensuring I have a good social life – for me this is essential as I also live alone and don’t want to become a total hermit. I also hate doing the books but, luckily, I have a very understanding accountant who works magic with the piles of receipts I send her.

What do you listen to when working?

I used to have Radio 4 on a lot but I find speech radio very distracting when working as I want to listen to the discussions. I switched to Radio 2 for a while, for the music, but the chatter in between songs drove me crazy. Spotify is my lifesaver – I have a paid subscription and have built up a huge library of playlists, which I select from depending what I’m working on and the mood I’m in. I listen to a huge amount of reggae, especially dub instrumentals, plus classical and film scores, rock and pop.

What is your most treasured work-related possession?

PerfectIt has bailed me out a few times when working on books of 600-plus pages! No matter how meticulous you are and how many items you log on a style sheet, it can still be easy to miss something. It’s very good at flagging up any inconsistencies. I always run PerfectIt at the end of working on a document, whatever the size, and recently I’ve started running it before an edit too as it can help you make styling decisions universally before you tackle things manually.

What do you enjoy doing when you’re not working with words?

Cooking. I love cooking – it’s how I relax. I’ve been working on writing a recipe book over the last two years – it’s currently in blog form, but I’m now whipping it  into shape as a book in my spare moments. My obsession with food extends to reading cookbooks for fun (I don’t necessarily cook from them) as well as eating and drinking outside the home. When I take proper time off, I eat, walk and explore my way round European cities and, if possible, hike too.

What’s your favourite book?

For work, it’s unquestionably my much-thumbed copy of NODWE (New Oxford Dictionary for Writers and Editors), which is looking distinctly shabby these days from the daily abuse I subject it to. Otherwise, it has to be Robert Tressell’s The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists. It’s a socially conscious literary novel up there with Dickens and Gaskell but more accessible, shot through with humour and grace, and underscores why I’m both self-employed and a proud member of my trade union!

Have you got any advice for aspiring freelancers?

Never, ever approach established freelances out of the blue and ask for information on “agencies, contacts or training”. It’s all out there on the internet and a little time spent on a search engine will dig up a lot of info on training, for starters. I get very cross when aspiring freelances ask me this and expect it to be handed on a plate to them – it tells me they are not prepared to put the work in to get started. And asking for contacts is a no-no – that’s my client list they’re asking for!

Louise Bolotin is a freelance editor based in Manchester. She specialises in editing financial and adult material of all sorts for publishers, companies and individuals. She runs PlainText Editorial (plaintext.co.uk) and her listing on Find a Proofreader is findaproofreader.com/listings/plaintext/.