Proofreading Prompts
Economic thinking
Beauty from the vault: the sky from our cabin in the White Mountains.
Now consider: such skies are actually rare. But great painters can imagine such a scene from having seen something like it only a few times.
I am a terrible proofreader. Therefore, a few weeks ago, I decided I would henceforth send everything which I wrote through Claude, to proofread it.
Every post on this substack since then has been proofread by Claude. But if you have been reading carefully, you have no doubt noticed several mistakes in each post that should have been caught by a proofreader. I would estimate that Claude has overlooked on average three such mistakes per each 1000 words.
I had already noticed that I got better results when I prompted Claude, “proofread this carefully” rather than “proofread this.”
So, I asked Claude about it. I pointed out some mistakes it had not caught, and asked how I should prompt it so that it would not overlook mistakes. Here is what it said:
Proofread this as a copy editor would, reading against the possibility that every sentence contains an error. Flag: (1) typos and spelling errors; (2) grammatical errors; (3) drafting residues — words or phrases that appear to be notes to the author rather than finished prose; (4) incomplete thoughts; (5) punctuation errors; (6) inconsistencies of register or tone. List every item you find before offering any stylistic observations.
Please help yourself to this prompt. Copy it and use it for your own proofreading instructions.
If, after using it, I discover a mistake that went unnoticed, I plan to point it out to Claude and ask for an even more detailed prompt, which would cover this new case. I anticipate that my prompt will grow in detail over time, like a law code.
It turns out that “proofread” is not an identifiable kind for Claude. Notice that it begins its own prompt, rather, with the language “proofread as a copy editor would.”
It also turns out that Claude is designed to be efficient, so that it skips some corrections because it views it as more efficient to do so.
Here is what it said about including the language about “drafting residue”:
Your request for the more detailed prompt arose from a case where I missed a "drafting residue" — a fragment that almost made sense but wasn't finished prose. The explanation was that without the explicit category of "drafting residues," I tend to read for sense and skim past things that almost parse. The structured six-category list forces a more systematic scan rather than a holistic reading.
The list points to something about our own skill of proofreading. It too consists of a cluster of skills. Consider our notion of “typo.” That kind of mistake did not exist before typing. Likewise, the old categories of scribal errors, such as “haplography,” no longer matter much. From Wikipedia:
Haplography (from Greek: haplo- 'single' + -graphy 'writing'), also known as lipography (from Greek: lip- from leipein 'to leave/to omit' + -graphy 'writing'), is a scribal or typographical error where a letter or group of letters that should be written twice is written once.
(The term is transferred to typographical errors. The scribal error comes along with a psychological theory about how the eye or the imagination causes one’s attention to skip, when letters are repeated.)
I will post here subsequent versions of my proofreading prompt, as it grows in comprehensiveness.
Did you see the headline last week, that the national debt has now exceeded annual GDP? An analogy would be: you have a household income of $100K, and you have unsecured debt of $100K, which you service with interest rates tied to some floating benchmark (say, LIBOR).
There is nothing magical about the threshold, >100% debt to GDP. There is also nothing of itself problematic about it, so long as there is some rational plan to see that the debt does not continue to grow indefinitely.
But there is no such plan. Congress has no will to limit the national debt and its continued accumulation. Rather, we are on track for another year of almost $2 trillion in deficit spending, which adds $2 trillion more to the debt.
Moreover, because of “fiat money,” there is no objective need for the government to limit spending, since it can always “print money.”
And the fact that the dollar is the world’s reserve currency creates a “moral hazard” that the government will continue to do so. (A moral hazard is when someone’s getting bailed out of bad behavior removes any incentives for the reform of that behavior.)
Also, a serious upshot is that the party in charge has a strong, short term concern to lower interest rates, whether that serves the public good or not. The reason is that lower interest rates imply a lower debt service expense in the Federal budget.
(Does Trump’s pressure on the Fed that it lower interest rates really derive from a concern to make housing more affordable?)
Also, accumulation of debt puts an upward pressure on all interest rates, because Treasury must offer a better return to sell all of that debt.
Does anyone care? At my School, at least, we educate our students to be concerned about such things.
Rod Dreher said this the other day on his substack. I was astonished that over a year since Trump’s “liberation day,” he was beginning to grasp what the tariffs mean in practice for small businesses:
People like to talk about how the economy is always the most important political issue. James Carville’s “It’s the economy, stupid” is the most famous articulation of this point. It’s the mantra that he kept hammering into the heads of Team Clinton when he was running the 1992 Democratic presidential campaign, to keep them focused.
Well, last night, having just arrived in southern California, I was having dinner with some folks. Everybody at the table was a Trump voter. We were all talking about how we feel about things at this stage in MAGA Two: Electric Boogaloo. It’s fair to say that feelings were pretty mixed. One thing stood out, though. One of the men at the table is a pastor who left the ministry to open a small business. He told us that it has been a real education for him in how the economy works.
A key component in the manufacture of the products he sells is made in the Persian Gulf region. I’m not going to say what it is, on the off chance that some reader here might recognize the source (highly unlikely, but still), but let’s just say I never imagined that this particular substance was sourced to the Persian Gulf. Anyway, he said prices for this substance have skyrocketed since the war started, and his business has been dramatically affected. He was telling this story as a way of illustrating the way he, as someone who previously was not involved in business, has been made to care about Trump’s war-of-choice on Iran.
I didn’t mention it last night, but this made me think about my small business owning friend in Tennessee who was a Trump supporter, even though she hates the way he behaves. Then came the Big Beautiful Liberation Day Tariffs, in which El Trumpo sprayed the world with indiscriminate tariffs the same way Tony Montana cut loose on his enemies in the gun scene of Scarface. My friend wasn’t against tariffs in principle, but the way Trump imposed them was so thoughtless, and it put her small business, which depended on imports from South America for a product not made in America, almost immediately at risk. She flipped on MAGA, because she saw the abstraction of the Trump tariffs — and saw them accurately — as a threat to her being able to feed her kids.
I bring this up because, like the man at the table last night, both him and my Tennessee friend were and are the kind of conservatives who mostly like what Trump does on cultural and social policy. But when his policies directly threatened their small businesses — which is to say, the way they support their families — it was a different story.
So, yeah, “it’s the economy stupid” more often that non-economic thinkers like me care to consider. But for their part, materialists sometimes make the same mistake from their side, thinking that there’s no problem that money (or, more broadly, a reallocation of financial resources) can’t solve.
I can say that the students at my School and its graduates are good “economic thinkers,” who most certainly are not materialists, but who saw immediately (day of, not a year later) these unfortunate upshots of the tariffs for the ordinary business owner.
Please note that the inherent instability of the Trump administration has implied that no sensible person would commit capital to manufacturing simply because some tariffs had been declared. Therefore, the tariff policy was of itself destructive, not constructive, besides being ultra vires.
There are two errors in the Dreher quotation, which Claude caught when I gave it the rigorous proofreading prompt. Did you see them? I’ll give the answers below.
I watched the movie, A Simple Plan, with my two older boys last Friday (“movie night”), about three men who become corrupted when they discover $4 million in cash in a downed airplane.
This led me to wonder about a list of best movies about greed. Which one truly is best?
Wall Street
The Treasure of the Sierra Madre
A Simple Plan
Or is it something else? Paid subscribers, weigh in! (Claude favors There Will Be Blood.)
Errors in the Dreher quotation:
"more often that non-economic thinkers" → more often than non-economic thinkers (Dreher quote)
"both him and my Tennessee friend" → both he and my Tennessee friend (within the Dreher quote; nominative case required as subject of "were and are")
Ciao!