The Perils of "Could You Just Proofread This?"

This one little request, seemingly innocuous, has opened more editorial cans of worms than any other. In common usage, it means “hey, could ya give this a check for boneheaded mistakes?” Unfortunately, to the average reader, “mistake” could mean anything from “I think this semicolon is a typo because who even uses semicolons anyway” to “This whole document is a waste of time and should be scrapped.” Writers and editors both need to watch out for this question, as it usually shows that the speaker isn’t sure of what they want done to the document.

Proofreading is a specific stage in the publishing process. A manuscript is typeset – prepared for how it will look on the printed page – and then the pages, in their final laid-out form (the proofs) are checked for any little errors. At the proofreading stage, mistakes should be small thanks to numerous previous editing passes, usually single character typos or the occasional one-word fix or layout adjustment. So yes, if your colleague asks for a quick proofread of a finished document, it may mean a check for little typos or typesetting irregularities.

What may happen, however, is that this “proofread” reveals serious problems. Awkward sentences. Redundant or meandering paragraphs. Tone-deaf jokes. Misused words. Vague descriptions that bleed into flowery language that then abruptly shifts into plain legalese. If you start stumbling over anything bigger than a misspelling, raise a red flag right away and check with your colleague. Ask:

• Do you want me to do any rewriting? Is there time and budget to do so?

• Should I fix the tone of this piece or leave the voice as is?

• Do you really want me to only check for typos or should I flag problems in grammar, word choice, and clarity?

In essence, you need to ask whether the other stages of editing – structural, stylistic, and copy editing – can be done to the document. A big trap for editors or readers with a keen eye is to try to fix every problem they see, but there may not be time or budget for that, or indeed, there could be real constraints on the document that prevent other fixes. The boss may have written a paragraph and ordered it untouched, some text may need to match a specific (legal) document’s wording, or, even if it offends your sensibilities, the style may just be that company’s corporate language.

As in many other parts of life, get consent first. You’ll save everyone a lot of grief.

How do guidebook researchers write restaurant reviews for tourists?

Restaurant reviews can make or break a restaurant, especially from a noted publication or a famed food critic. The food pages of the New York Times aren’t the same as a travel guidebook, and the researchers have to choose restaurants in a decidedly different manner, with different criteria and priorities than we would use in picking a place to eat back home. 

Problem #1: Location

First is location. All restaurants more than 30-minutes journey from a cluster of hotels and attractions, whether by public transit or taxi, are excluded. This naturally excludes many high value small restaurants that can’t afford center city rent. 

Problem #2: Hostile

Second, the absolute requirement for a basic willingness to serve foreign guests and deal with bumbling tourists eliminates many other dining places. Popular and famous restaurants have been known to discourage foreign guests from making reservations or walking in because training staff to deal with them is not worth their time, and the disruption of clueless intruders is a net negative for the ambience.

Problem #3: Language 

Still, most restaurants are more than willing to serve you, but insurmountable language barriers make dining out all but impossible. There’s scarcely a backpacker who can’t recount having to point at someone else’s plate just to get food to come to the table. No English menu, no English spoken, inability to handle English reservations, and a smiling but panicked staff all eliminate many good eateries from the running. 

Problem #4: Price Spread

Now we are left with restaurants in good locations that are willing and able to serve foreign guests. The first real criterion that a typical diner would use is value. Tourist trap restaurants are rife in our remaining pool so these are eliminated for high prices, low food values, and often poor ambience. However, among high value (taste and ambience vs price) restaurants, there’s a large spread of price points, everything from the $6 lunch to the $600 once-in-a-lifetime culinary masterpiece. With limited space to print restaurants, covering the price spread is the next important consideration, but at least at this point the researcher is beginning to write restaurant reviews.

Problem #5: Dietary Restrictions and Variety

Dietary restrictions reserve ten to twenty percent of restaurant selections, whether for vegetarians, vegans, or those with food allergies. Such places are often lower value than other establishments due to the lack of options that meet the above criteria outside major cities. 

Finally, given space for, say, twenty restaurants in a major city, the researcher needs to select a mix of cuisines, levels of popularity, and kinds of ambience across neighborhoods and the price spread, making sure there’s a good balance in each district. Pride of place goes to local cuisine, but international options round out the offerings in case the reader has gotten sick of the local specialty.

Problem #6: Budget

And here’s the real kicker: most guidebook researchers have neither the time nor the budget to try out every restaurant considered for inclusion in a guidebook. At best, three or four eateries and a couple bars could be visited and small dishes could be sampled. Anything more than this merely burns through the writer’s advance at an untenable rate. Worse yet, not every restaurant that is taste-tested is a keeper, even if the online reviews seem favorable. 

So, what to do?

So why not just follow online restaurant reviews and skip guidebooks entirely? Aggregate reviews have their own set of problems. Starred reviews skew heavily toward cheap, tasty joints because everyone can afford to try them, whereas famously excellent restaurants are often docked stars because the food, although very good, didn’t taste “$200 good.” 

Another critical issue is that your tastes may not agree with the common opinion. An “odori-gui” (dancing food) Japanese restaurant will drive off 90% of Western customers with its still-living or twitchingly dead seafood dishes, but maybe that’s just the thing an aficionado of fresh seafood craves. Conversely, a horde of foodies could make a trendy new spot seem good with rave restaurant reviews, but someone who likes simpler dishes may recall Julia Child’s quip, “It’s so beautifully arranged on the plate – you know someone’s fingers have been all over it.” 

So what’s the best solution for the problem of restaurant reviews? As a guidebook writer who knows how the sausage is made, I use guidebooks to give me a general lay of the land. I check online reviews of a few places listed and try them out if there seems to be consensus between the writer and the public, or if the writer recommends the spot for a reason I care about. If the guidebook seems reliable after several spots, I have a keeper, but if not, I take their recommendations with a grain of salt and turn to restaurant review websites to cast a wider net. 

If all else fails, ask a local. They may point you to a place that has trouble serving you, but chances are, the food will be good nevertheless. 

Advertising for the Unremarkable

Robert Stevens, founder of Geek Squad, has been quoted saying, "Advertising is a tax for having an unremarkable product." This aphorism has a ring of truth: haven't we all seen products that we know to be mediocre widely advertised and more broadly used than they really should? 

The corollary of this thought, however, is less palatable. "If I have to advertise, my product must not be very good." The best brands don't need any advertising because they are self-evidently good.

This isn't really fair. Countless ideas die on the vine, thousands of products go unsold, and it isn't because they are bad. On the contrary, human ingenuity produces more and more interesting, useful and innovative products or services every day, fuelled by advances in technology. For every instant best-seller that passes through the market by word of mouth, untold thousands languish in obscurity. 

Advertising serves to spread awareness and to educate the consumer about new possibilities in the marketplace. Take the original iPhone, for instance. Far from taking off, it sold only a tiny fraction of what the later models would sell, and that was with a huge interest from the tech press and media at large. Apple needed to convince the public that a smart phone was something useful and desirable, and this process took years and several iterations of the phone to catch on. 

So considering the overwhelming density of new products and services available, all companies need to give their offerings the strongest boost possible, with excellent writing and sharp imaging. With that it may stand a chance in the modern day's dynamic market. 

If you know your product really is unremarkable... see the above aphorism and start spraying money. Joking aside, who wants to make and try to sell anything less than a great product that a team can get behind? It is better to go back to the drawing board and improve a product than waste money on a lackluster offering that the market will see through within half a year.