Readers and writers blog

The best proofreaders also have a great sense of writing style, and if you mix that with a great sense of humor, you’ve got Bye Bye Buy.

No, that’s not a typo. The weblog’s title refers to the fact that its author and her husband decided to save money by not spending any this year on non-necessities like convenience food, restaurants, entertainment, fashion shopping, professional grooming, gifts and cable TV.

And how do I know about the best proofreaders? We’ll get to that in a minute. First, to the author, who writes under the nom de blog June Cutoff Cash — appropriate enough, considering her purpose. But the purpose, while interesting in itself, isn’t what makes Bye Bye Buy so appealing.

It’s that mix of style and humor. Which produces some wonderful asides.

For example, a Jan. 5 incident with a broken coffee machine and a co-worker — “the nicest co-worker you could ever ask to have, who wants me to say his name is Proton, which it isn’t. (Isn’t a proton something scientific, like a molecule or something?) Well, anyway, poor Proton was standing there, hapless” . . . when . . .

. . . five days into my no-spending year, I had my first hissy fit . . . ‘THERE IS NO COFFEE!’ I screamed at Proton. ‘THERE IS NO COFFEE AND I HAVEN’T HAD COFFEE YET AND I CAN’T GO BUY COFFEE CAUSE I AM NOT SPENDING ANY MONEY THIS YEAR!’

Somehow, Proton talked me down and we got the machine fixed. It just needed its something emptied. And all was well. Until I got an email from someone saying, ‘Hey, nice spazz-out in the coffee room!’ Turns out like 78 co-workers could hear every word. Nice. Nice way to climb the corporate ladder.

And by the way, I had a $5 gift certificate to Starbucks in my purse the whole time.

It’s like you are her best friend, and she’s telling you her story, asides and all. Which can be really annoying unless the storyteller is a really good writer.

Which she is. As well as a good proofreader. Which isn’t good if you’re now in your early 40s and didn’t have good eyesight to begin with. Thus, the visit to the eye doctor that led to her April 9 entry:

If you are now thinking, ‘Oh a proofreader. How fun. I love to read,’ please let me take this opportunity to fill your nasal cavities with a fast-hardening cement. You do not love to PROOFread. You love to read a nice novel. You like to catch up on that Miss Marple, see what shenanigans she is up to now. So do I. That, however, is not PROOFREADING. Unless you read like this: ‘Y (capital Y? Yes.)ou caaann copyyy saaaved (saved past tense? Yeah. Okay.) dataaaa (data? Are they using data as a plural? Are they using data as a plural in the rest of this thing? Okay.) (Wait. Didn’t it say 10 pages ago that you CAN’T copy saved data? Hang on.) . . .’

That is what I do all day. That is what I have done all day for the last 10 years. And on my lunch hour? I read. After work? I like to do me some reading.

You can imagine the fine effect this has had on my eyes.

She was doing this work in Los Angeles when the year began, and not spending on extras isn’t easy in L.A. where life is all extras. But in August, she and her husband — his blog name is Marvin Gardens, yes, Monopoly fans — moved to rural North Carolina where he found a teaching job and she eventually got freelance proofreading work on line.

They’re still saving money, but not as much as in L.A. I hope this doesn’t end Dec. 31. Because it’s going to take me at least that long to figure out why their blog nameplate shows only British currency.

So how do I know about good proofreaders? Because in the old days in the newspaper business, we had lots of them. But then computers arrived to replace the proofreaders. I came to work one day in Portland, Maine, at a newly computerized newspaper when I noticed a blown-up xerox on the wall, a copy of an obituary we ran the day before. I’ve changed the woman’s name but not what it said: “Mabel Peach, a longtime proofreader for the Portland Newspapers, died Monday after . . . etc.” Our new computers, coming to the word ‘proofreader’ at the end of the top line, had broken it into ‘proo-’ and, beginning the next line, ‘freader.’ We missed you, Mabel.

Check out Bye Bye Buy, the best proofreader blog we could find on Google and now the latest addition to our blogroll of well-written sites.

– Sid Leavitt