Why Are You Still Reading?

DID YOU PROOF YOUR COPY TODAY?

Why Are You Still Reading?

In the early days of desktop publishing, designers routinely used lorem ipsum as placeholder copy while waiting for the real words to arrive.

And clients routinely asked me the same question:

“What language is this?”

Explaining lorem ipsum over and over became tedious, so I created my own placeholder copy for QuarkXPress. Mine was written in English, intentionally humorous and impossible—or so I believed—to confuse with finished copy.

It included phrases such as:

THIS IS NOT REAL COPY.

And, for anyone who continued beyond that warning:

WHY ARE YOU STILL READING?

Then it ran in print.

Think about how many people must have looked at that page. The designer saw it. The account person saw it. The client saw it. Someone approved the proof. The printer printed it.

Everyone looked at the page.

Apparently, nobody read it.

The placeholder copy did not merely look unfinished. It actually told everyone reviewing the page that it wasn’t real—and still, nobody caught it.

That story has stayed with me because it illustrates something people often forget: looking and reading are not the same thing.

A designer can become so familiar with a layout that the words begin to look like shapes. A client may concentrate on the photograph, the logo or whether someone’s title is large enough. One person assumes another person checked the copy. By the time a piece reaches the printer, everyone has seen it so many times that they are no longer truly seeing it at all.

Our brains recognize the pattern and quietly fill in what they expect to be there. That is why a typo can remain invisible through twelve rounds of revisions and then leap off the page the moment the finished piece arrives from the printer.

It is also why I believe in what I call the drawer test.

When possible, put the work away. Close the file. Work on something else. Come back later and look at it as though you have never seen it before.

Distance restores your eyesight.

At St Jude Medical, I didn’t just learn proofreading habits—I created them for my team. They were simple, but they worked:

Read the copy out loud, because your ear will catch what your eye skips. Change the format—print it out or view it in a different font—so your brain stops auto-filling familiar shapes. Check every number, name, and unit of measure as if it were the most important element on the page, because in medical communication, it often is. And when possible, read it backwards line by line, so meaning disappears and only the words remain.

Designers also need to read the copy they are designing—not merely pour it into a text box and make it attractive. A strange line break can alter the meaning of a sentence. A missing word can make a company sound careless. A phone number can lead somewhere it was never intended to go. A beautifully designed page containing the wrong information is still wrong.

And placeholder copy is never harmless simply because everyone knows it is temporary.

Temporary has an astonishing habit of becoming permanent.

I created my placeholder copy because clients were reading lorem ipsum and asking what language it was. Ironically, once I replaced it with plain English—including the words THIS IS NOT REAL COPY—it proved that people could look directly at words without reading them at all.

So, why are you still reading?

Because this time, somebody did. So, when was the last time YOU proofread your copy?