How I Lerned to Prooffread

One thing about writing a blog: it helps punch up your proofreading skills.  The ability to proofread is vital even in this electronic age.  Spell checkers miss words that are misspelled but form another word, so they don't tip you off if your writing condemns a pubic display or reports about the loins at the zoo.

For instilling this ability I owe a debt of gratitude to my CSUN journalism 110 professor, Tom Reilly.  A former newspaper reporter and editor for the Valley News, he taught with an eye toward preparing students for the real world.   There was no slack for late assignments or poor spelling.  Each time he'd grade assignments and hand them back he'd report to the class the spelling, grammar and factual mistakes he caught.  He delivered the news with a slight grin that said he was half-bemused, but only half, and his method helped us improve without embarrassment.  A dedicated teacher, even during the final exam he couldn't refrain from throwing in a good lesson.  For extra credit, he wrote a sentence that went something like "He wasn't phased when he received the news his favorite uncle had passed away" and gave instructions to find the spelling error.  For the record, the word should be "fazed". 

The hardest lesson I learned in that spring semester of '78 was the result of a proofreading error I'll forever remember as "The Louis Mistake".  One day Professor Reilly brought to class the head of a news agency, a man named Louis, and held a mock press conference in which we each queried Louis  about his job and wrote a thumbnail sketch.  In the story I wrote, my only error, factual or otherwise, was once omitting the "u" in his first name, which changed the pronounciation and gender.  For that mistake, Professor Reilly scored my paper 5 on a scale of 12.  After class I griped to him how unfair it was to knock off seven points and give a failing grade for what was essentially a typo.  "It is unfair," he replied.  "I should have given you a zero."

My final grade was a B.  It was a high B, I'm sure, and it would have been a shame if I had been seven or fewer points away from an A.

Sadly, Professor Reilly passed away in 2002 at the young age of 67.  His obituaries online credit him with chairing CSUN's journalism department twice and rebuilding it after its destruction in the 1994 Northridge earthquake.  He took a sabatical between chairing appointments, traveled the world and authored books on journalism history.  He died when printed newspapers were still viable but the competition in the 24/7 news cycle was already compromising good reporting skills like fact-checking and spelling to the point where sloppy reporting often is the story.  In some eternal classroom, Professor Reilly is commenting about these practices and he isn't fazed.