Everyone hates proofreading

I've pretty much spent all of today in my office proofreading. It is a task that all authors hate. It is tricky and time-consuming and requires deciphering an arcane set of proofreading marks. And not all journals use the same marks! It is still kind of amazing that in this digital age, it seems that a lot of journals are still being typeset by hand rather than taking the author's digital manuscript and importing it. I did not spell "coral reef" with three "e"s, for example. I'm just glad that this was a short paper --- only four pages. Yet those four pages contained at least nineteen typos.

Nineteen that I found, anyway.

Still, the drudgery is compensated by the fact that working on a manuscript for publication is a good thing. It helps me believe that I am making some progress.