Love my job, love writing; but absolutely hate proofreading.
There are so many sites that tell you how to avoid them, and the dangers of losing your reputation when you make them; but how often does anyone tell you it’s ok you did.
Yes, it is. You are human, and as such we are programmed – genetically made even – to make mistakes.
Our spelling mistakes are consistent
Yes, make it once, and you’ll probably make it again.
Consistency of spelling errors in human performance appears to be the rule rather than the exception… Most spelling errors are not only consistent, they are also systematic because, unlike random or guesswork attempts, they reveal the existence of an underlying logical, though incorrect, reasoning.
Somewhere, somehow someone taught you wrong – guess it’s ok to blame your second grade teacher for your downfall now. It’s your job now to re-Pavlovian condition yourself to spell it right.
English spelling and grammar doesn’t make sense
What is a kid to do when letters don’t sound like what they taught us they would in the first grade. Some things are silent, somehow P & H together make F, and some English speaking places use ‘ou’ and some don’t. That’s a lot to take.
We’re born to pass up the details
It’s the way our brain was made and how it functions. With all the stimuli we are bombarded by every single day, we wouldn’t be able to function if we zeroed in on all of them. That means, try as you might when you proofread, you can’t help skim and skip – it’ll happen whether you like it or not. The solution? Print it out, give it to a friend and turn off the distractions.
In short, while it’s my job to make sure they don’t happen…I’ll be the first to admit that they do.
Are you human?
[...] But reading them – and wondering how they had got through the subs, led me to think how easy it is – in the pressure of our daily work lives – to not see something so very obvious and to make stupid errors in other forms of communications. Yes, everyone makes errors and it’s true that we often don’t see our own errors. [...]
[...] an editor, a major part of my job is to correct a writer’s grammar. This includes spelling errors, incorrect homophones (or words that sound similar but aren’t if you think about [...]