You'll probably be amazed at all of the errors you detect when you are not concerned with content, meaning and story-telling artistry.
I aim my eyes at the nine-o'clock position and make a clockwise scan on each page, but do what works best for you.
Check your book for these bloopers:
- Wrong typefaces, particularly when text is pasted-in from another source
- Commas that should be periods -- and vice versa
- Straight punctuation that should be curly "typographers' marks"
- Curlies that curl in the wrong direction
- Missing spaces between paragraphs or sections (!!!!!!)
- Flush-left justification that should be full justification
- Bad justification in the last line of a page
- Chopped-off descenders where you decreased line spacing (leading) or if the bottom of a text box is too close to the text
- Wrong-size bullets
- Rivers
- Too-big word spacing
- Normal letters that should be ligatures (more for large type than in body text).
- Accidental spaces after bullets
- Improper hyphenation
- Misaligned numbers in a list
- Roman text that should be italic, and vice versa
- Normal text that should be boldface, and vice versa
- Ignoring highlighted warnings in MS Word.(!!!!!!)
- Automatically accepting MS Word suggestions (!!!!!!)
- Gray text that should be black.
- Insufficient space adjacent to images
- Images or text boxes that floated over the margin.
- Images or text boxes that 'slid' down and covered up footers
- Missing periods at sentence ends (!!!!!!)
- Missing opening or closing quote marks.
- Periods that should be inside a closing parentheses -- or outside
- Repeated words (!!!!!!)
- Wrong headers, missing headers, switched verso and recto headers
- Subheads that are too close to the text above and too far from the text below
- Too much space between lines in a multi-line title, chapter name or subhead
- Inconsistencies such as 3pm on one page and 3 P.M. on another.
- Pages with numbers that should not show numbers (blind folios)
- Words that shifted from the bottom of one page to the top of the next page
- And one that does require reading: chapter names and page numbers in the table of contents that don't reflect a change made in the actual chapter name
- And another: chapters missing from the TOC.
- And another: a topic not in the index because you added something after completing the index
- And another: words that should have been deleted but were not, and may have accidentally been shifted into another part of a paragraph
- And another: names that were changed in some places but not in all places (!!!!!!)
(Eye photo from Microsoft. Thanks.)
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