How the Typos Get Through

[Rafellin]

And thus, why proof readers are essential.

http://www.wired.com/2014/08/wuwt-typos/

 

[Teresa Edgerton]

Well that's a reassuring theory: we miss our own typos because of our brilliant minds. I'll hold on to that comforting thought.

 

[Ray McCarthy]

I only see what I want to see. Nor do we read by looking at letters. I'm a fast reader, so I'm poor proof reading others and rubbish at my own.

Perhaps also it explains why proof reading my own writing at least has some success when I copy from the Laptop screen to Kindle DXG (Though my laptop is 1200 lines high and does allow thus good document use.

 

[Jo Zebedee]

I find switching to the ipad for a final edit helps. I think I get blind to the onscreen errors.

 

[Glitch]

Altering the page margins to make the lines wrap sooner (or later) is apparently good for proof reading your own work. I believe it's down to the words looking different causes your brain to read what is there rather than assume.

 

[J-Sun]

who studies typos of the University of Sheffield in the UK.

Not typos from anywhere else? Or maybe he just spots Univertisy of Shefeild.

The end of the article mentions changing things up - color or font. Another thing that helps is to read it backwards (not practical by word due to contextual reasons and plain difficulty, but at least by sentence or paragraph).

But the "familiar destination" thing makes sense. I know what I mean to say, so I must have said it, right? (Hah!)

 

[Ursa major]

Reading out aloud changes the pace and seems to require a reading different process in the brain. Both help one find further errors.

 

[Michael Colton]

I was wondering about this not with something I wrote, but an error I noticed in my edition/printing of Consider Phlebus.

 

[TheEndIsNigh]

Most of my typos (no really, honest) is due to the key board not being able to keep up with my typing. I often get two Capital letters at the start of a word. I'm pretty sure that given there are usually only two, it's not the I haven't pressed the key. Annoyingly, although the editor (this one is particularly good at auto correct) will put the usual mistypes (OK just plain bad speellinng) right it doesn't auto correct WHere or However or JUSt in case.

What they often do is notice a badly spelt word and stick something in there instead that isn't the word you meant. When you read it through the correction looks like a good word, but can easily be out of context making the sentence nonsense.

Now there's is a strange thing - When I typed that However above I deliberately had an 'O'. But look at it now. It's been put right - what's going on?

 

[JunkMonkey]

I vouch for the change of font/size/margins trick.. It works. When I was at art collage the tutors used to encourage us to turn our paintings upside down or look at them in a mirror to get a fresh impression of them. It's amazing how such a simple action makes such a large difference to one's perspective. (Sometimes literally in the case of my drawings.)

 

[Teresa Edgerton]

Changing the font not only helps you find errors, it freshens your perspective in other ways, too. If you've worked on a scene so long that you're blocked, changing the font can make the scene seem new to you, so that you can work on it again.

It's not anything like infallible -- nothing is when it comes to writer's block -- but it works well some of the time.

 

[tinkerdan]

I see this all the time. I do several edits myself and hand it off to another set of eyes and then we do several edits back and forth until we have a handful of edits in and hand it to some new eyes. This can go on until we have ten full edits and then we hand it to a pro, thinking we got them all.

That pro sure does earn their money.