Proofreading is not glamorous. It is rarely inspiring. It does not feel like creativity. And yet it might be one of the most important things I do.

How many of us have sent a text, DM, or comment, then come back to it later only to realize we can’t even understand what we wrote?

Maybe “will” became “with.”
Maybe autocorrect decided you were trying to communicate in a new dialect.
Maybe your sentence simply wandered off a cliff and took your credibility with it.

I don’t proofread every message I send more than once, and I’m not pretending I do. But I do proofread every email I send and every public comment I write, usually a few times. Recently, I started living by a simple mantra:

I’ve never regretted giving it one more pass.

That mantra has saved me more times than I can count, especially in my music publishing work. When I’m about to publish a large project or deliver an edition to a customer, proofreading becomes its own kind of performance. One pass might take an hour. Sometimes several hours. Once, I decided to proofread an orchestral piece I had already released after it had been on the market for a while. That single pass took me around 12–13 hours.

Which brings up a side note I’ve come to appreciate. Big publishers have systems that let you identify which printing you’re looking at: a date, a copyright line, a code on the last page of the score, something like that. In my case, everything is digital, so my “printing information” lives in the file name. Not glamorous, but it works.

Proofreading is grueling because, at some point, you have to decide, “This is good enough.” You release it. You move on. And if the work sells well, you come back later, a few months or a couple of years down the road, and give it another pass.

And yes, I’ve never regretted that either.

Sometimes a better source surfaces. Sometimes a fresh look reveals obvious things you were too close to see the first time. When changes are significant, I send an updated file to customers free of charge. That is part of the responsibility of publishing digitally. You are not shipping a fixed artifact. You are stewarding a living document.

It’s funny to me now, because as a student, I didn’t think proofreading mattered much. In high school, I rarely proofread at all. I’m sorry to my teachers for that, though they probably already knew.

My mindset was simple: I wrote it; it’s done; move on to the next thing, preferably something fun like playing the cello or composing.

Even in college, I wasn’t especially careful. I remember once pulling out a freshman English paper from a stack I was about to toss and laughing at how clumsy it was. I also remember wondering why it got a B, or even an A-.

Graduate school improved things. But what really forced me into the kind of proofreading I do now was my doctoral dissertation. That process planted the seed. When you spend long enough inside a document that large, you eventually realize that meaning is built not only through ideas, but through clarity. I proofread the dissertation for content, grammar, formatting, citations, footnotes, consistency, spacing, and all the small details that make a page feel trustworthy. 

It can feel endless. But I’ve come to believe something simple:

Proofreading is part of respect. Respect for the reader. Respect for the performer. Respect for the craft.

And in my teaching, I try to build that respect into the process. When students are writing papers, we bake in strategies: drafts, outlines, bibliographies, revisions, and checks for internal consistency. In music theory or composition, it might be interval checks or Roman numerals to confirm that the harmony actually does what the student thinks it does. It’s all the same principle.

Proofreading is a big subject, but it’s also simple. You learn more the more you do it.

So if you take nothing else from this, take the mantra:

You will not regret another pass.