How to Catch Your Own Typos

 

Anyone who's been writing for a while can agree that catching your own errors is tough, bordering on impossible. This is true even for people who are great at catching others' errors. In my copy editing work, that's my job. And I'm good at it. But my weekly column runs with more mistakes than I care to think about. Bad ones, like the time I wrote "the word 'is' is a vowel." (I meant verb.)

Here's a column I did recently about catching your errors. And are a few bonus tips to better catch your mistakes.

1. Sleep on it. You'll catch more errors with fresh eyes.

2. Change the font of your document, preferably to something really odd-looking, before your final proofread. This can shake up your brain's expectations about what the text will say, making it easier to pay attention to what it actually does say. I've been using this technique for a few weeks now and it seems to help.

3. Read each word out loud. This forces you to focus on every word rather than letting your brain "fill in the gaps."

4. Read the last sentence first, followed by the second-to-last sentence, and proceed backwards to the beginning. Again, this is about shaking up your mind's expectations about what's on the page.

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This entry was posted on Monday, January 4th, 2016 at 10:00 am and is filed under Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

One Response to “How to Catch Your Own Typos”

  1. February 23, 2016 at 4:29 am

    One of my biggest faults in my writing is not editing it enough. I'll give it a quick glance, but that's it. Sometimes I convince myself that I won't catch the errors, so I just let the editors catch them for me. This is so dangerous, because they may not see everything that I do. It's become so important for writers to also be editors, and that's something I'm having to be conscious about every day.