Why is it that you only see those pesky, embarrassing typos in
important pieces of writing AFTER they’ve gone to press? Like this one
from one of my own archives:
…he never fully recovered from the pubic humiliation of having his…
I’ve never fully recovered from that particular "pubic humiliation"
either. When you work with words for a living, you really can’t afford
to let mistakes like that slip by. And even if writing isn’t your
profession, typos can still make you look careless at best, ignorant at
worst. Modern spell checkers are useful tools, of course, but they don’t
catch everything. My spell checker didn’t save me from the unfortunate
"pubic incident" because spell checkers highlight only words that they
can’t find in their dictionaries. Pubic is a perfectly good word, just incorrectly wielded in this context. But why didn’t I see it myself?
I didn’t catch the typo myself because my brain, expecting to find the word public,
filled in the missing L. Our brains are masters at getting us to see
what our experience and expectations tell us we should see. Thus the
pubic/public problem wasn’t the only typo that managed to slip by in
that text: I tend to flip letters when I type, and there were several
instances where I’d typed form instead of from; my
brain, doing what brains like to do, had quite merrily transposed the
letters back into their correct positions as I proofread because it knew
what I had meant to type.You’ve probably already thought of a few things your own fingers tend to fumble over when typing.
Everyone has been guilty of letting a typo slip through at some
point, so your ego can probably recover from what are obvious mechanical
errors. But what if you happened to let one of the pet peeves of
eighth-grade English teachers slip unnoticed into your writing when
you’re not looking, unspeakable horrors such as writing loose when you mean lose? Of course you know the difference between loose and lose,
but when your deadline is imminent and you’re writing in a last-dash,
coffee-fueled frenzy, it’s easy to read right past this kind of slip-up.
And there are plenty of uncharitable people in the world who will not
see it as a mere slip-up, but rather as a grave indication that you have
the intelligence of a turnip. (Note: I am not one of those people!)
So you can’t trust your spell checker or even your own brain
when it comes to proofreading your own texts. It sounds like a hopeless
case, doesn’t it? Luckily, it’s not. Here are two proofreading methods
that can help:
1) Enlist the help of a second reader to help you proofread. It works
like this. Your friend slowly and carefully reads aloud from a hard
copy while you silently read either the online version or another hard
copy. Because the text is new to your friend, her brain is not as likely
as you are to fix mistakes as she reads along. Between the two of you,
you’ll catch far more errors than you would on your own. You then
correct them on the online copy while your friend watches to make sure
that you don’t inadvertently add another error. Don’t have a second
reader available? Then point 2 is for you.
2) Use text-to-speech software in place of a second reader. You read
silently on the hard copy (you’ll catch more errors on a hard copy than
you will online) while the text-to-speech software reads the text aloud
to you. You will be surprised at how many errors you catch this way,
errors that you probably never would have noticed when reading silently
to yourself. Mark the changes on the hard copy, and then VERY CAREFULLY
enter them into the online copy.
Of course, no method is guaranteed to catch everything. But if you
use either text-to-speech software or a second reader, you will have
done just about everything you can to minimize the risk of pub(l)ic
humiliation because of unfortunate typos. Good luck!
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