Don’t squander everything you’ve learned about professional script format and the intense creative effort you’ve made writing your script by failing to proofread your work before showing it to readers. A classic line like “To be or not to be” loses a good deal of its punch when it’s typed “Too be ore knot t6 bee.”
Proofreading differs dramatically from ordinary reading. When we read, we swallow words whole. Our eye skips across the surface of sentences, constructing meaning at lightning speed, without laboring over every individual character. It’s how we read as quickly as we do. It’s also why we miss so many of our own typos. We see what we expect to see. We see what ought to be there. But when we proofread, we must force ourselves to read every letter, every scrap of punctuation, the characters that are actually there, not the ones we meant to put there.
This requires a whole new skill. And a good deal of effort. We have to slow ourselves down. Discipline our eye. See the page.
But that’s only part of it.
We have to know what we’re looking for.
We’re looking for misspellings. They’re easy to spot while the script is still on the computer screen, underlined in wavy red lines. Search for them and correct them.
We’re looking for the wrong words, correctly spelled. “Choose” when we mean “chose.” “Conscious” when we mean “conscience.” “Lay” when we mean “lie.” “Now” when we mean “not.” Or “General Motors” when we mean “Major Payne.” The wavy red lines don’t help us here. Only a careful, disciplined, slow reading of our pages will root out these errors.
We’re looking for more of the wrong words, correctly spelled. Homophones. Those pesky sound-alike words we regularly mistake for one another:
whose vs. who’s
to vs. too vs. two
affect vs. effect
its vs. it’s
brake vs. break
pedal vs. petal vs. peddle
illusion vs. allusion
then vs. than
We’re looking for punctuation errors. Periods missing at the ends of sentences. Question marks missing at the ends of questions. Commas missing in direct address.
We’re looking for capitalization errors. Proper names missing a capital letter. Capital letters where they don’t belong. Offscreen sounds, camera direction and character introductions you’ve failed to capitalize.
We’re looking for omissions. A speech that has inexplicably vanished. A dropped word. A scene gone AWOL.
We’re looking for dialogue formatted as direction, or direction formatted as dialogue. Character names missing over dialogue. Shot headings masquerading as scene transitions.
Tackle proofreading in three distinct steps. Three search-and-destroy missions through the pages of your script.
Step one. Scroll slowly through your entire script on the screen. Find every case where the electronic spell-checker indicates a misspelling and either correct it or overrule your spell-checker.
Step two. Print a hard copy of your script and read slowly through every character, every punctuation mark, every word. Set aside at least two minutes per page for this step. If you can do it much faster than this, you’re missing things. With a red pen, mark every correction you find. Beside every correction, make a big X or checkmark in the margin so you don’t miss it when you return to make the changes.
Step three. Comb through your script page by page, making each correction on the screen that you’ve made on the page. Here’s where your red pen and checkmarks in the margin help you. Make the changes carefully so you don’t introduce new errors into the text.
Read your script again. This time, you’re looking for words to cut. Examine every shot heading and ask whether it can be streamlined by omitting a word or two or three. In every sentence of direction, search out words that don’t pull their weight. Eliminate them. Don’t repeat in direction what you’ve just stated in a shot heading. In dialogue, less is more. Characters shouldn’t tell us what we already know, especially if we’ve just seen it. Cut, cut, cut. The quality of the read can improve dramatically simply through the trimming of verbal fat.
Find someone else to proofread your script and find the errors you’ve overlooked. Recruit a grammar nerd. Someone who knows his dangling participles and split infinitives. Someone who isn’t you. Loan him your red pen. You’ll be mortified to see how much you’ve missed. And relieved to have caught all those mistakes before you send your script to CAA.
Please, please, please don’t ask a busy agent, executive, producer or reader to read your script until you have.
On behalf of everyone who reads scripts for a living, thank you.