Training accountants to proofread
I was approached by Blick Rothenberg accountants to teach 'proofreading' to accountants, and I have developed a training course that I have now been delivering for five years.
The documents that employees in this company deal with are accounts and reports. The documents are formulaic and the vocabulary is limited, there are no proof stages as such and no liaison with typesetters or designers. By the nature of the jobs they do, all trainees should be accurate, so what could I teach them?
The first thing that I established was that they had no need to learn proofreading marks and definitely didn't want to spend time on this. However, there are other aspects of traditional proofreading that are important, such as using a red pen or other distinguishing colour, the value of neatness, indicating explicitly what you want changed, and so on. So the first exercise focuses on these points. After that we take a look at common pitfalls (difficulty of spotting errors in block capitals, thin letters going astray or duplicating themselves, e.g. in liabilities, etc.)
We then take a break and look at grammar and punctuation, and because the range of the text is so narrow this is tightly focused on the text trainees will be working with. Depending on time available I have a consolidation exercise at the end. We rarely use it, but it's always good to have an exercise in hand just in case.
Feedback from the course is good, and here are some trainees' comments:
- Good balance, well structured and organised
- Enjoyable and informative - practical knowledge that I will be able to apply on a day-to-day basis
- Title of course was maybe misleading, the content was actually better and more useful than my perception of 'proofreading' suggested.
I now deliver a similar training course to a subsidiary of Blick Rothenberg, BRAL a multi-lingual, leading provider of outsourced accounting services