Quote:
Originally Posted by tomwed
"When you’re proof reading, you are trying to trick your brain into pretending that it’s reading the thing for the first time. Stafford suggests that if you want to catch your own errors, you should try to make your work as unfamiliar as possible. Change the font or background color, or print it out and edit by hand. “Once you’ve learned something in a particular way, it’s hard to see the details without changing the visual form,” he said."
FROM What’s Up With That: Why It’s So Hard to Catch Your Own Typos
What's Up With That: Why It's So Hard to Catch Your Own Typos | WIRED |
tomwed: we had to proof read newsletters being sent to employees and one of the techniques we used was to read each article backwards forcing us to see each word for spelling. It was a certainty that if just one word was misspelled we would be hearing from an employee and his/her bravado all you could do is say thank you for your important input.