In these modern days of apps, spellcheckers and predictive text, we should all be able to write perfectly, shouldn’t we? Unfortunately, it’s not the case and some apps can actually make it worse (see my previous post on Why Grammarly isn’t the answer.)
The sciencey stuff
As writing something purposeful is a high-level task, your brain focuses on the more complex skill of combining sentences so that they make sense and are meaningful to the reader. It puts less focus on turning letters into words. Psychologists call this generalisation and it’s one of your brain’s shortcuts for storing information. How often have you driven somewhere familiar and not really remembered doing it? It’s the same mind process.
In a similar manner, we don’t read every letter individually, we anticipate them and our brains are wired to read those bundles of letters as a shape and then attribute meaning to that shape. For example:
Yuo’ll prabolby be albe to raed tihs evne thuogh it’s a jubmeld mses, rgiht?
This is why, when you’re reading your own work, you may well miss the fact that you’ve got for example, ‘the the’ next to each other in a sentence, as you’re really focusing on what you’re trying to get across to the reader, rather than the words you’re actually using to do it. And, whilst autocorrect can be a godsend, it can also sneakily change things you don’t want or shouldn’t be changed. Apps and autocorrects will also probably miss words that have been accidentally omitted. E.g., These tragedies must happen again. An autocorrect is unlikely to pick-up that you’ve forgotten the word ‘never’, which in this case would be catastrophic.
5 Simple ways to proofread your own work
There are ways of editing your own work by changing the familiarisation that your eyes have become accustomed to. Here are some tips below:
- Try reading aloud. Your ears often pick up mistakes that your eyes have failed to and if you have another person that you can read to, even better.
- You could try changing the font or switching the background colour, this breaks the familiarisation so you’re more likely to spot something you’ve skimmed over before.
- Print out your document and go through it with a red pen, reading every single word individually before re-reading as a whole to ensure it makes sense.
- Read your work in a different order, perhaps starting at the end of a page and working your way back to the start, or you could even try reading the text backwards so that you’re really focused on the words!
- If you have limited time, you can be really tactical about what you look for. If you have a style guide this will help. For example, are your headings all capitalised, or just the first letter, do you use the Oxford comma, have you used the same date/time/measurements format throughout? You can also pay special attention to those grammatical errors that people often get wrong such as: their/they’re/there; affect/effect; its/it’s; accept/except; your/you’re; to/too/two and so forth.
Common sense but fundamental
If you’re really short on time, do use a professional proofreader to check your work. Getting it wrong can be disastrous as often this is your customer or reader’s first impression of you or your company. A spelling mistake or typo could be an indication to them of the quality that you provide and the care you show. Don’t take the chance, it’s just not worth it and a big mistake can be difficult to recover from.