Self Editing Is Not Enough

A brief comment on proof reading; Yes, I do proof read these blog posts before I post them and thank God for Spellcheck, but any high school English teacher will tell you that it’s unwise to proof read your own writing. Spellcheck won’t catch when you mean they’re but you’ve written their or when you add an apostrophe before an S when you want the word to be plural, not possessive. But even blatant spelling errors seem to slip by even after proof reading several times. In fact, it seems I need to post to the blog and see it online before I can catch all the mistakes.

Maybe it’s a matter of your brain, knowing what it wants to say, sees the text the way it should be, not the way it actually is. I tried to proof read a book I wrote and went through a dozen proofs, which I had to buy, before I caught all the mistakes. And these were obvious mistakes that I must have read many times without noticing but suddenly jumped out at me almost as soon as I opened the new proof copy. Luckily I live in the age of Print On Demand where you can print up one book at a time so you don’t have to live with hundreds of copies filled with typos.


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