Last But Not Least: An Interview with Leslie Vermeer

Leslie Vermeer is a longtime editor and academic who teaches editing and publishing. She is also the author of The Complete Canadian Book Editor and, most recently, Last But Not Least, a book about proofreading that includes tips and practical exercises. She spoke with Lucy Kenward about her newest book. The following interview has been lightly condensed.

Lucy Kenward: What inspired you to write a guide to proofreading? Who did you have in mind when you were creating Last But Not Least?

Leslie Vermeer: I teach a 13-week credit course on proofreading and copy editing, and even after that it feels like there’s still so much to know. So that was the kernel: the students at MacEwan [University] and then thinking outwardly. 

I wasn’t really thinking about professional editors. I was thinking about people who don’t necessarily have the background: students, admin assistants and people who get called upon to do proofreading because someone on their team says they know a lot about words. I devised this book as a tool to make their workload a little bit lighter, to provide strategies for being an effective proofreader so it becomes something they can confidently say they know how to do.

LK: Many students liken proofreading to a treasure hunt, a game of ferreting out errors. You caution readers about seeing proofreading this way. How should proofreaders think about their work?

LV: I say in the book that I don’t think proofreading is a game of “gotcha!” The reason we have proofreaders is to help us become more confident in our communication and not be ridiculed and embarrassed. If you’re outraged by typos, you have the wrong mindset to be a proofreader. The intent of proofreading is to prevent miscommunication; it’s not, “Oh, I found a typo, now give me a gold star!”

When we’re in a classroom setting, I can give feedback about rewriting entire documents or putting in the Oxford comma even though it isn’t the style of the document. That’s a softer landing than going out into the world and doing that for your first client — and then not working with that client again because you’ve overstepped.

LK: Proofreading is a blend of content (knowing what errors to look for and which ones to change) and process (knowing how and where to spot errors and how best to fix them), as well as tact and sensitivity. How can editors best develop this proofreading skill set?

LV: Tact and sensitivity — and all of the soft skills — are so much of what editing is about. There’s a lot of technical knowledge in proofreading. Of course, you need to know style sheets. You need access to dictionaries and all kinds of other resources. But a big part of it is how you work with another person. Somebody wrote words, put their mind out on a page to be visible to others. That’s such a vulnerable thing to do.

In a classroom setting, we often do peer editing, and it’s great. You can almost hear the “ouch” when an editor has overturned a comma the writer meant to put in. I think every editor needs to be edited regularly, just to be reminded what it’s like to be on the other side of the writer-editor transaction. 

LK: Students love practice exercises and answer keys! I was surprised, though, not to see any mention of checklists. Was it a conscious decision not to include them?

LV: I had brilliant editors on this project. Lauri Seidlitz was my first editor, and when she retired, Kay Rollans picked it up. I’m grateful because they were both tactful and kind but also rigorous, and they asked the tough questions.

Lauri and I did have the conversation about what to include in the final sections of each chapter. We wanted some solid takeaways that people could grab onto: anchors for the person who is just starting their journey in editing and publishing. I don’t use checklists. They’re not part of my process, but checklists would be a great add-on to a future edition. 

LK: The technology around proofreading is changing quickly. Do you have any tips on how to keep up with best practices?

LV: I started writing this book in 2017. AI wasn’t a thing we were talking about. Grammarly didn’t exist. A lot of things have changed. I like technology, and I use digital tools, but I think it’s important to be aware of the pitfalls.

I recently had a wonderful group of students. We talked a lot about how much knowledge you need in order to use some digital tools to their best level. I could tell that some students were using a digital grammar tool and just accepting what it was giving them instead of thinking about what it was telling them.

Technology can make the job faster, but humans still need to be making the decisions because, at this point, the software isn’t always that good.

LK: What’s the most important thing you hope editors take away from this book?

LV: I hope this book will be a resource. It wasn’t written for professional editors, but editors are such a generous group. As we have opportunities to teach, to bring recent graduates into our offices and our practices, this is one resource we can use to help those people have the strengths we expect — or need — them to have in our particular workflows.

When I was a younger editor, we would hand something really consequential to a proofreader who maybe didn’t have much training. I think good proofreaders are incredibly skilled, and I’d like it if this book was something that people could use to start investing in developing that knowledge. It is not the final word by any means, but it’s a way of opening the conversation for someone to say, “I want more training; I want to take some coursework; I want to read another book about proofreading.”

LK: Even professionals make mistakes. What’s a proofreading gaffe you’ve made?

There’s the typo that appeared in the Editors Canada newsletter when a colleague and I were its editors many years ago. Pierre Berton had just died, and someone had written a beautiful article — a tribute to Berton as an author — and she misspelled his name. We had “Burton” instead of the correct spelling. I still regret that one, and it is one example I used in the book.

LK: Anything to add?

LV: Every change contains the seeds of more catastrophe. But we also need to realize that in a book there are 889 catches alongside every typo we’ve missed!

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