 I don't know how far you can read these slides, can you read it at the back? Anyway, it's a joke, so no matter. But shall I read it out? It just came to me about half an hour ago, I thought I must share this with you, especially in this context. Even I can't read it. Mummy, I have a drinking problem. Oh my God, Timmy, you're only six. This is your fault, Bob, she tells the father. My fault? Maybe if you'd spend more time with him. Our six-year-old has a drinking problem. He sure as hell doesn't need a role model like you. Then I've done nothing but give for this family and this is what I get. The father says, I'm leaving, fine, I don't need you. And Timmy sure doesn't need you. And then the mother says, oh Timmy, don't cry, it'll be okay, we'll be alright without daddy and stuff like that. And she hugs him and so on. Talk to me, Timmy, tell me about your drinking problem. So the little child takes out the book from his bag and says, if Joe drinks one liter of juice and Tom drinks two liters of juice, how much do they both drink? So this just illustrates quite cutely, I felt. The fact that often we don't listen, we jump to conclusions and that illustrates a lot of the things that were discussed in yesterday's class. And listening is very important. Listening to yourself also. Often we have a problem because we rush into defining what a solution is. First of all, defining what the problem is and then also rushing into defining what a solution is. And you find this often with students. You jump to you and you pose them a problem and before you know it, they've just jumped at the first answer that comes to them which might not be the best one. So we are hoping that all the students here, not most of you, all of you, when you go out into industry, you'll be more than just technically good or technicians. Most of you will have to take up very soon a leadership position as has been our experience with all our students who go out from here. And once you get into those kind of positions, communicating is very important. More important than communicating to others is listening. People don't realize the role of a manager is to listen. The role of a manager is to listen. The role of a guide is also to listen. It's not for me to tell you what to do. It's for me to listen to your ideas because you might have more ideas because you have more time than what we have. So this takes this story ahead. And this morning we have our colleague here, Professor Prakash Vedya. And today we thought we'd illustrate this whole idea about listening and not taking by the whole notion of proofreading. How many of you here are acquainted with the proofreading language? There's a very distinct proofreading language. One of my avatars before I came to IIT was I was running a small publishing house. And one regret is that I never got down to studying the details of proofreading. So I'm hoping to learn something today also. And this also reflects the fact that often we get burdened by seminar reports and MTP reports which are very quickly hacked together. And you don't seem to realize that before you even come to the waver, you have lost marks, you have lost points because your presentation has been bad. You've got bad English, it's badly formatted. You've not thought enough as to how you want to present and stuff like that. And when the examiner comes into the room to have the waver or even the guide reads that thing, there's a bias against you because you've shown slip shot shoddiness in presenting a work and the attitude in the reader is that if they don't care, why should I care? And so the elements of putting forward a good presentation is in proofreading it. Ideally when you write a report, you should also get a friend to look at it because the friend will spot things that you would never even have dreamt of. So in this two sessions we have today and on Thursday, I wanted the whole class here because we'll go through the motions step by step. Today we'll introduce you to the language of proofreading, the symbols of proofreading and so on. And on Thursday we will give you a written matter which we will give you, which you will proofread. And then we'll see how many of you pick up how many errors. And in the class we'll go through what you should have noticed. And there's also an offline assignment where we want each of you to go and look at a TED talk. You saw one example yesterday. Make a half page note on it, right? Double spaced note and just upload it. Listen to a TED talk, make a half page note on it and upload it on model for us, right? And bring a print out with you next day to the class on Thursday. Bring a print out and we'll hand those things around or shuffle them around and you will proofread somebody else's TED talk summary, okay? So one more thing I'd like to say is that most of you are used to expressing yourself in spoken language. Language I say because not everybody is absolutely comfortable in English, right? Many of you must be comfortable in your own mother tongues and stuff like that. But when it comes to written communication, right? You might not realize the level or the quality of your written communication. And I feel that if you guys are not so accurate in your own mother tongue, there's a very good chance that that inaccuracy will also be found in your English written communication, okay? So this is now a session in which we'll look at the whole notion of proofreading. I'll ask Prakash Bediya to join us here. He's got an interesting background in the sense that he's an IIT Bombay alumnus. He used to be the same batch mate as Professor Uday Gaitonde here and he works with Professor Fatak's 10,000 teacher training project. And apart from his many skills is that he's got a passion for technical writing and he's also deputy director of research at an embedded systems company in Mahpe called App Labs. I don't know how many of you have heard of it. So he's working a lot on things like the clicker project. But technical writing is his passion, so it gives me pleasure to invite him here today. Sorry, this connection doesn't seem to be working. So we'll give a live lecture. The first part you saw, this was a lecture given about two years ago when this teacher's training program started for distance education. So we had maybe 30, 40 people on staff at that time and to train them about proofreading because we had to do a lot of documentation and publication. That's why these lectures were conducted. And I'll introduce Firuza, my assistant. She had joined at that time and she has attended this lecture live, which you saw just now. She is an MCA and in her six years of college, she has written six books about software. So before she joined here, she had written six books. So she is closely connected with technical writing. So first, proofreading is not a very popular subject or nobody considers it to be important. It's not on anybody's radar. It's like backstage work, which is not recognized. So when we try to explain that proofreading is required when you create a document, many people are surprised. They say we write so well. There is no need of doing any such thing. I'll give an illustration that there was a boy who was seeing double. It is called Diplopia that both the eyes don't align and you start seeing double images. He was not aware that he had this problem. So his father told him that son, you are seeing double. He said, how is it possible if that were so? I would have seen four moons instead of two in the sky. He is already seeing double, but he thinks double of that is double. So that is the problem with proofreading. It is the problem with all quality control. Proofreading is a kind of document quality control and quality control nobody likes. Everybody likes production. Everybody likes design. Everybody likes innovation. Nobody likes quality control and maintenance. But without these two, the production cycle is not complete. Whenever in quality control, a quality control expert goes to an industry and asks, do you have quality problems? They say, no, maybe other industries have problem. We don't have problem. For us, everything is running smoothly. So this is the first problem that many people are not aware that they have a problem. First, you have to recognize that you require attention to this. That is the first step towards learning proofreading. After you have understood that, then you can learn the techniques and then you can understand what is the significance of those techniques. So generally, when a manuscript is written by average people and a proofreader checks it, if you take an A4 size sheet, that is this size, it will have about 30 lines of type script. And each of these lines will have at least one error. That is the statistical average. So if you are making a one-page document or one paragraph, then nobody will notice the errors. But if you are writing a 300-page book, then 13 to 300 is 9000 errors. And these won't escape because anybody who reads the book is likely to notice some errors or the other. So the first step is to reduce these errors by checking and correcting. After your first pass of correction, the error level will come to approximately 1 to 3 per page. That is on the whole page, you will see one red mark somewhere, 1 to 3 marks. Even then in a 300-page book, you will have 300 to 900 errors, which is also not small. So you have to correct again. After that, you will reach a level of roughly one error in 10 pages. So if you have a short document, it will be error-free. But a long document like a thesis will not remain error-free. And at the last stage, the ideal is of course zero errors, but which is not practically attainable. So you will reach a level of few errors in 300 pages. And most of the published material has this level. If you have say few errors and you detect them, then you don't announce them because it makes people aware. If there are too many errors, then you attach an errata at the end of the book. But this is considered shameful in publishing industry. In any foreign book, you will hardly find an errata. If there are few errors, they are corrected in the next edition. They are not announced. In Indian books, there is never an errata because they never check. If you read, you will find out that there are many mistakes. But we want to read the standard of what is called as edited English. Now English has become common people's language and everybody thinks that he has command over that. But the English used in publishing, whether professional publishing or academic reports, industry reports, etc. has to keep a certain standard. That has to be the publishing standard and that is called edited English standard. So if we want to become professionals and enter in industry administration, international trade, then our communication, our written communication and publications has to follow edited English standard so that we become world class. Now you might ask that when you first check the proof, why don't you reach this zero error or few errors? Why do you have to do it three times or four times? Can anybody take me? Why does it happen? Practically, whenever you try this, you will find out you cannot take out all the errors in the first pass. What is the reason for that? If you are looking carefully word by word, why don't you find all the errors in one pass? It will simplify life. No, there may be independent errors. What you are saying is there may be correlated errors which will appear after your first pass. That is also not true. Most of the errors are actually standalone errors. The reason is very surprising that we think that writing is a process and error correction is at a higher level and it is immune to errors. But error correction is also a process. So that is also error prone. So while correcting a lot of errors, you are likely to miss some of them. This is the technical reason for that. You can never do it in one pass. So you have to do it multiple times. Now when you do multiple times, firstly it is boring. Firstly you have written it. Then if you go through four times, you will find that if you do it yourself, there will be still some errors left. Because when you do it the second time, your brain already knows what is the content and it will miss the same errors as it missed the first time. So it is always better to have many eyeballs looking at your manuscript. So proof reading is not a lonely affair. If you write, you ask your friends or classmates to correct it and vice versa. That when somebody else writes, you should form a group and circulate the manuscript and errors which are missed in the first pass will be detected in subsequent passes and everybody will benefit. If everybody does it alone, nobody will reach that level. There is an anecdote that what is the difference between heaven and hell? Supposedly both have all the facilities etc. Both have lot of food. But the people in hell are hungry and people in heaven are satisfied. So what is the reason? Because in both the places everybody's hands are tied at 90 degrees. So if you tie your hand at 90 degrees like this and try to eat, you can't eat. So in hell nobody cooperates. So everybody is hungry. In heaven also they can't eat by themselves but they feed each other. That is why they are satisfied. So that is the technique to use. That you have to read each other's manuscripts and you will find errors and you will also learn about how other people write and what kind of errors other people make etc. So when we actually do exercises, later in class exercises you will have to work alone. But later on when you use this technique in your actual life, you will have to form groups and since you will know the common language of this, then everybody will be on the same page. So manuscripts have to be checked multiple times. In publishing industry we will see how they work. What the author writes? Generally he used to write by hand. So it is called manuscript. That means hand. So it is hand written. It is called capital MS. Referring to the short form is capital MS. So the manuscript goes to typesetting or used to go to typesetting. Then after typesetting they used to take a print out of that. That is actual printing, physical printing. And it used to be checked by proofreader. So proofreader used to do what? He used to check it against the manuscript. Whether what is written in the manuscript has been typeset. Means he used to verify, not validate the document. Verify whether it is as per original. If the original has a mistake, proofreader would point out from his experience. But he would not correct it. But whatever mistakes occurred in typesetting, he would correct. And whatever related to the format of the document etc. Those he would correct. And he would send back the manuscript to the author. And author had to certify that this type script is otherwise correct except for these errors. After it came back, those used to be modified. And the final proof would go to the author. Then author had to certify that this is error free. Then he would keep one copy of that with himself and submit one copy for publication. If there was a dispute later on, then they would check against each other's copy. This was the method that's why publishing used to take very long. Before the advent of electronic publishing, it used to take very long. Even today, now authors are themselves typesetters. So there are fewer proofreaders. In the olden days, newspapers used to have a whole full of proofreaders. Whatever stories were filed, they used to check. Now the reporter himself is responsible for what he files. If a mistake is found in that, then the reporter is responsible. Nowadays, all magazines and journals also have the same policy. You have to give a printable file. If there are errors, they won't check for errors like they used to. The post of proofreader is now empty and everybody has to become a proofreader now. That's why we have to understand the mechanics of this. So if you want a document to be proofreaded, then while preparing the document itself, you have to take care. Like they say if you design a product, it has to be designed for manufacturability. You might make a prototype and exhibit it, but during manufacturing, they might find that it is not practicable. So that type script that you prepare has to observe certain rules so that it becomes easier for proofreading and easier for final formatting. So the first rule is that anything, we will call this as a draft that is the first version. Any draft has to be on one side of paper. You never write or print back to back. The back is supposed to be empty. This is the first rule. Second rule is while printing out, you have to use double spacing. That is, you have to leave one blank line after every line. So the document will become about twice long, but that is worth it. Why? Because as we saw, average there is one error per line in the first manuscript. But these errors are not uniformly distributed. That means some lines might have 4 or 5 errors. Some lines might have 0 errors. If there are 4 or 5 errors in a line, how will you show them? The manuscript will get crowded and somebody is likely to miss while correcting. So if you have blank line above every line, then you correct just above where the error has occurred in the blank space. Then when you read in the blank space, you know where the error is. Plus as we will see later on, the errors are also summarized in the margins. So you have to leave margins on both sides in a manuscript. So by looking at margins, you know that there are 4 errors in this line. You just go through the margin column and you know how many errors are there. So the errors are pointed out twice, once where it occurs and once in the line in which it has occurred, so that they are not missed out. So these are the first two rules that any document must be single sided. There is no pasting, no stapling, no pins allowed. If you have to attach something, you either rewrite it or retype it. But no attachment because if that gets lost anytime, your document will become terrible. And if you have to add substantial matter in between, then you give an extra page number like 1a and add the page. But don't write in margin, don't write like this, etc. Like people write on a postcard that after writing they realize there is still some more matter. Then they will go back and write in the margins, etc. So we shouldn't write like that. It has to be in double space format and on one side only. So we have understood basically why proofreading is required and what are the preliminary precautions we have to take while proofreading. Now you also must have made documents, you must have checked and corrected and you must have done it informally that you will have pointed out something, etc. And even if somebody is correcting, they will intuitively understand. So why is there a separate language required? Anybody can answer? See if you are correcting yourself, you can set up your own language like children have their own language which only they understand. But if you want to communicate to others and as we have seen that proofreading has to be done in a group and in principle anybody else should be able to understand what you have written. That means you need a standard language so that otherwise there will be misunderstanding in that and the whole purpose of error correction will go. So that's why you have to use standardized marks so that anybody uses the same symbols and they have the same meaning. So when we see those symbols, those symbols have been summarized on a sheet. So we are distributing these, you will each have a copy and we will go through this list. So you have this in your hand in any case, you don't have to look up on the screen. So as you can see there are three types of marks. The first are called operational signs that is the first column. Then second column is called typographical signs and punctuation marks. So punctuation marks we will cover only shortly in this session because we will have whole session for only punctuation. And as we will find out later that more than half the errors in proofreading are of punctuation. That's why we need a separate session for that but only the marks we will understand but how to actually find out where punctuation is required. That will require a separate session. So the first sign is delete. So if you want to delete something normally you might have typed an extra letter or you might also want to delete some word. So how will you indicate that? If you write D for delete like English D then the checker will think that you want to add D over there and he will type extra D in that place. So to avoid that this symbol is like a Greek small delta like you use in partial differential etc. So that it is not confused with normal English. So this del indicates that delete. So whichever you want to whichever letter you want to remove. You just cross it and write del over there. That means it is delete. Now when you delete you want to cover up the space and join the word together. So otherwise there will be a blank like a missing tooth. So to indicate that the next mark says that close up. That is remove the space. Now in word processing it automatically happens but in the olden days this was not automatic. You had to rearrange the whole type. So and third symbol is a combination of these two. That is you write del and put this mark that join together. So this is only for deleting letters within a word. If you are deleting a whole word you just cross it with a horizontal line. And it is understood that when you eliminate the word that space is filled up. So for that you do not use this join up symbol. Similarly if you are removing the whole sentence then you just scratch it with a horizontal line. And it is understood that that space will be made up. But only for individual letters you have to use this delete and join. Then after you have done correction says when you read on you might find out that maybe what you did was wrong. That what the author wanted to say was better said in the original format. Now what do you do? You can't rub on the manuscript. So next to the correction you write state and circle it. Whatever you circle during proofreading is not entered on the final copy. That means it is your comment whatever is circled. So state is a latin word which means let it stay or let it stand. So that will cancel all your corrections nearby. And restore it is like undo command on a computer. So this is the undo command state. Then sometimes you may need to insert space like words get joined up. That proper space is not left. So this hash is the symbol for space. This means space. So wherever there is space required you put a vertical line in that place between two letters. And then put a hash there. That means there is a space required there. Then these next three symbols are not relevant anymore because these are for mechanical type setting. When there is to actually put physical types for that these symbols are required. But those are not required because now your word processor takes care of everything. After that we come to an inverted P. That is mirror image P with a double vertical line. This means make a paragraph. Sometimes the author will keep on writing continuously without realizing that he has actually finished the old concept and is addressing something else. So if you realize that that has happened when a new topic starts. Then there you make a vertical line and put this. There are also other ways of doing it. You can put a reverse z like thing or put a reverse l at that place. That means you start a new line. Make a new paragraph. Yes. We will come to that. At present it is only as we said it is only verification. Correct. The proofreader also has to check the content. Especially in our case because we are not checking random matter. We are checking related matter and we are supposed to know. We are not supposed to do it mechanically. Even the older proofreader used to make out that here the topic has changed and they would put this symbol. Whether you check for content, your point is or only the form. First we have to correct the form and then the content. Now this next symbol also you forget. Move right, move left is if the lines are not aligned properly while typing. Which also does not happen with modern word processes because if you give justification it will justify everything. But with titles and such things this can happen that somebody might type the title starting from left and it may have to be centered. So you have to say this indicates that you push the type on left or right. If it is from both sides then you center. Move up, move down is also not required any longer. Left, left, left is now justification that many people do only left justification and right is left free. But that does not look good. You should always justify on both sides for printed matter. If you see professional publications they never do this like magazines etc. They will occupy the full column, newspaper they will occupy the full column. That looks good. Now transpose and spell out. Transpose means many times you might have noticed that letters get interchanged. Especially if one letter is typed by left hand and the other by right hand. The brain knows that these two are to be typed but they may not be pressed in correct sequence. So letters get interchanged especially between two hands they tend to get interchanged. Because one hand works faster than the other and that letter comes first. So in that case you write transpose and the symbol used suppose the word is doer and it is spelled as D-E-O-R. Then what you do is you put a symbol like this which says that you put left on right and right on left. Sometimes two words might get interchanged like verb and noun etc. They come in wrong sequence. Then for the whole word you can put like this. The word or even phrases sometimes you might find that some phrase should come as introductory phrase which has come later. Then you can use the same symbol for phrases also that means transpose you interchanged. Nowadays it is simple because you can pick it up and place it elsewhere etc. Spell out this is required in modern times because everybody tends to use short forms. So within a closed community the short forms are understood but when you are writing for somebody else and especially professional writing short forms are not permitted unless they are approved short forms. Only some acronyms if you are using then you have to declare the first time it occurs. Otherwise the reader will be clueless if first time you do not declare what is your full form. But otherwise like prof for professor, lip for a library such things are not allowed in professional writing. All words must be spelled out. So this says that you spell out whatever is this word. Then the next are typographical signs that is the kind of font you are going to use. So this ital means set in italics that is guilted. So if you want to emphasize the word or if it is the title of a book or some such thing then you want to put it in italics that word stands out. Then you write italic. Reverse of that is set in roman type that is normal english. Because sometimes the author specially with word processing gives the italic command and forgets to put it off. Then you will find lot of matter becomes italic though he wanted only a few things to be italic. Then you point it out and say that go back to roman script. Italic is like a bracket that after you give the command you have to take it back after it expires. So this is roman type. Bf is boldface you know boldface. So now it is simple. Now capital and small this is capital and small what we call small is called lowercase. You must have seen in word processing and capital is called uppercase. You know why this is called uppercase and lowercase instead of capital and small. See if you observe statistically most of the letters are small. And in english at least only the first letter of a sentence and some proper nouns start with capital. But otherwise capitals are rarely used. So if you want to have stock of type faces then you will have fewer capital type faces and many more smaller type faces. In production because they used to actually put those types in a box and make printing. So you need that much stock to make those pages. So while composing there is to keep the small letters in a box like this like pigeon holes. And then pick up from that and set. Capitals are rarely required so they were put like this like your laptop screen is. They were more difficult to access. Like in the kitchen you will find those things which are normally required will be in front. Those things you rarely require will be on the wall. So the organization used to be like this. There used to be one set of boxes like this and another inclined on the table. So this box was called uppercase and this was called lowercase. So it was for the printer that this letter is to be taken from uppercase then it is automatically capital. Similarly lowercase that it is automatically small. Still the same terms are used even though now this method has vanished. We do not call capital and small that is only in school. They are called uppercase lowercase. A C small capital that is the letter is the same size as lowercase but it is capital. That is used for emphasis in some places. There are specific rules for that. The height of the letter is that of a small letter but it is capital letter. Next check type image is also not required because now everything is automated. Next two marks that is V and inverted V are required and they are especially required for punctuation. So when you say V and put something inside the V that means it is above the line. You are lifting it up with this V. So if you want to give a superscript like giving references then you have to put that number. If you write the number in the same line then people will try to read as part of the line the reference number. So footnotes reference numbers etc which you want to indicate those you should write like this that it is superscript. Even in mathematical notation like power when saying a raise to x then how will you tell that x is not in the same line. It is above a that is superscript sign. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Few minutes. They have to leave with it. Okay fine. So remaining is punctuation marks which you can read by yourself. Now next time what we will do is what you want to tell them an exercise. Yeah. You can you can create some documents by yourself and maybe check with each other or check by yourself using these signs. So that you will get accustomed to using these signs. In the next session that is on Thursday. Yeah. Okay. So like I said it will be useful if each of you can see a TED talk on your own. Summarize it in one page. Print it out. Double spaced. It can be on two sides of a page or whatever. Right. And bring it to class next time. And what we will do is we will change it around or shuffle it around and you will proofread your friends text. And then we have a standard text which we will bring next time. And we will invite you to proofread that and find errors. And you will be quite interested to know how many varying sorts of errors we are able to spot in that in that manuscript. And this will be a very interesting exercise. Okay. So next lecture which is on Thursday is a practical. Right. So we will see you then. So see a TED talk. Make a summary of it and post it on Moodle and bring a print out with you in class. Double spaced. Thanks.