Project Gutenberg is one of the greatest resources available for teachers and students. Instead of buying public domain books, schools can save money through Gutenberg's free options for reading books. They can be downloaded in several different formats, or they can be read online. One way for those in the education community to add to Project Gutenberg would be to help proofread pages for their always-growing library. Eventually, the corrected documents will become e-books that are available for reading on computers, Kindles, or printed off and used in classrooms worldwide.
Why Students Need Practice Proofreading
Proofreading is a part of editing, but it is not a synonym for editing. Proofing writing is the same as double-checking a math problem. Most gifted writing students can get away with not proofing short work, because even if they lose a few points for small errors, they can fall back on their strong ideas and talented writing. Most proofing errors are caught through editing, which requires assigning multiple drafts. Multiple drafts are usually only required for writing longer than a few paragraphs.
Teachers can help students become conscientious proofreaders by giving them meaningful opportunities to proofread writing that will be read by others. Students learn to proof not just by editing their own papers, but through peer-editing and being involved with an extra-curricular activity such as being on the journalism or yearbook staff. When a student is reading through another student's essays or through another staff member's story, he is not seeking to change ideas. Instead, the proof reader is merely looking for unintended errors. By seeing the number of unintended errors other students make, hopefully the student will develop self-correction habits and proofread all work, even if it is a mere few sentences.
Proofreading on Project Gutenberg
Although some proofreading projects are complicated, Project Gutenberg has level one proofreading assignments that would be perfect for secondary gifted students. Students are not required to change spellings, alter words, or edit anything. Project Gutenberg specifically requires that proofreaders do not change what the original author wrote. The Distributed Proofreaders guidelines instruct proof readers that, "If the author spelled words oddly, we leave them spelled that way. If the author wrote outrageous racist or biased statements, we leave them that way. If the author put commas, superscripts, or footnotes every third word, we keep the commas, superscripts, or footnotes."
What students will be proofing is small conversion errors, such as correcting the number of spaces after punctuation marks and using correct hyphens and dashes. For students who write with software that automatically corrects spacing, learning to proof for such errors is a valuable experiences. Some students never use dashes or hyphens, and proofing might be one of the few opportunities to demonstrate an understanding of the mechanics.
Why Artificial Intelligence Needs Human Proofreaders
Many Project Gutenberg books are dependent on optical character recognition, which is known as OCR. Optical character recognition is artificial intelligence in action. The computer "reads" the scanned document and "guesses" at decoding the fonts into words. Usually, this is done with great accuracy, but small errors can sneak past the OCR process. Project Gutenberg shows a scanned text and the corresponding computer generated text, and proof readers are needed to read what the computer could not.
When students are proofreading for Project Gutenberg, they are actually correcting OCR errors. The students compare the original page to the computer's OCR version, and correct small errors.
Before students can begin proofreading actual documents, they will need to understand the guidelines that Gutenberg requires proof readers to follow. Then, they will practice on the example page. In one example document, th original page has the word "San". The computer output shows the word as "5an". Students then correct the word by replacing the "5" with an "S". After the students have proofed about ten pages of the P1 (basic) level, they can move up to the next level of proofreading. Teachers can also do this with a whole class as part of daily language practice with a projector or a Smart Board.
Not only will proofreading professional writing on a regular basis improve student skills, it will help gifted writers develop needed proofreading habits. When teachers offer a real world opportunity to help others by using gifts and talents, they are encouraging an intellectual citizen philanthropy, and Project Gutenberg is certainly a worthy beneficiary.
Alex Sharp - Alex Sharp is a teacher who has been keeping Suite101 readers up to date with the latest in audio- and e-book gadgetry since 2008.
