This is what my tutor told me on my recent assignment.
What they meant was, I have corrected mistakes that should have been left in the text.

Wait! What?!

I know! There is a general perception that proofreaders will correct the smallest of mistakes and return your text to you completely error-free. That’s what I thought too, until my tutor has marked my assignment and showed me why that is not always the case.

Let me explain.

You know when you start reading a new novel, and straight away you can’t put it down. Things are happening, characters are ‘talking’, and from just a few lines of the dialogue you already get a sense of what their personalities are like and you start to get that mental picture of the type of people they might be?

That is exactly the type of text I was asked to edit as part of my assignment. Whilst doing the grammar check, one of the things I changed was ‘You understand me?’ to ‘Do you understand me?’ Because grammatically the second sentence makes more sense.

Here is the ‘but…’ part.

What I didn’t realise was that this small change made the difference to how that character was now portrayed and how the entire scene felt. If I made more changes along those lines, it would have altered that mental picture you create when reading. In other words, I would have unintentionally changed the story.

Thankfully, it was a learning exercise that allowed me to make this type of mistake and learn from it. It helped me gain a new skill – to be able to spot the grammar imperfections that make text more powerful, and to distinguish them from the errors that make it weaker.

If you’re wondering how grammar imperfections can make text more powerful – they make it more relatable. How? Let me ask you this:

Have you ever met anyone who spoke perfect English?

Me neither.

My point is, most of the time your text will have to be written with pretty good grammar, but, as I’ve now learnt, there will also be times when perfect English won’t be what’s the most important. Knowing when to put more emphasis on one or the other is something I am now able to do. So, here is to learning new things and to not over-correcting!

Happy writing.