Mark Twain on Proofreading

The difference between the almost-right word & the right word is really a large matter--it's the difference between the lightning-bug & the lightning.

Mark Twain's well-known observation (delivered in a letter to George Bainton on October 15, 1888) appears at the top of the "Language/Writing" page of a university's continuing education website--just above a blurb for "Mistake-Free Grammar & Proofreading." Except that Twain's line is misquoted, and the word "lightning" is twice misspelled as "lightening."

Twain himself had little tolerance for such errors. "In the first place God made idiots," he once wrote. "This was for practice. Then he made proof-readers."

Yet as an old newsman, Twain could understand the inherent difficulties of proofreading effectively. As he said in a letter to Walter Bessant in February 1898:

And then there is that other thing: when you think you are reading proof, whereas you are merely reading your own mind; your statement of the thing is full of holes & vacancies but you don't know it, because you are filling them from your mind as you go along. Sometimes--but not often enough--the printer's proof-reader saves you--& offends you--with this cold sign in the margin: (?) & you search the passage & find that the insulter is right--it doesn't say what you thought it did: the gas-fixtures are there, but you didn't light the jets.

Such awareness, however, didn't expand his sympathies for those in the proofreading trade. Once, when told that a printer's proofreader was "improving" the punctuation in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Twain telegraphed orders to "have him shot without giving him time to pray."

This week we tip our green eyeshades to the writer described by Time magazine as "America's original superstar."

Essays by Mark Twain:

• "Advice to Youth"
• "Corn-Pone Opinions"
• "A Fable"
• "On the Decay of the Art of Lying"
• "Two Ways of Seeing a River"

Image: Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) on the cover of Time magazine, July 14, 2008. Portrait by Michael J. Deas.