what we were taught in school, from grade school through graduation from high school. Back then, schools still practiced sentence diagramming and I think I was the only one who actually enjoyed it. 
When I worked for the advertising directory company, we not only proofed for spelling and punctuation, but also for pricing accuracy and for content of the ads to be sure that they met FCC regulations. We had a huge book of regulations on our desks as a reference.
Typing and proofing commercial scripts was just part of the job at the ad agency AV department. It also involved calling and writing to stations, contacting talent for the producer, sometimes hand delivering script changes to a recording studio, fielding calls for the department boss, and being a sounding board for the script writers. Ad agencies are very hectic environments with a lot of distractions and deadlines. Focusing in the midst of chaos was essential.
Both of those jobs were done before PCs, e-mail, cell phones, and fax machines, using typewriters, landlines, and post office mail to communicate changes.
The proofing skills came in handy when writing college papers in another language. Before turning in a paper, it had to be scrutinized for things that did not come naturally to me because of differences from English, like diacritical marks on letters, adjective and noun agreement, noun and pronoun declension, verb conjugation, etc. By then, a computer was available for writing, but usually highlighted possible errors instead of automatically correcting them. Handwritten answers on tests still required checking them myself.
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