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Re: proofreading lament



On Wed, 1 Apr 1998, David Bowman wrote:

I am extremely blind to the typographical errors in my writing, and when

What proofreading tricks to the rest of you use to see your own typos?
I'm getting desperate here.

You are not alone. I never was a good proofreader of my own work. But I
could spot errors in others' work immediately. I read right by my own
errors and mentally correct them without noticing. And now that my eyes
are getting worse with age, it's more frustrating.

When I must submit something for publication that's got to be right, I
find someone else to proof it. My wife is always good at that.

BTW, I've found all grammar and style checkers to be useless, and a royal
pain to use. I once had to review several of them for a magazine, and got
free copies of the best of them. They now sit in their boxes unused. I put
long passages of some of my favorite authors through them--Mark Twain,
H.L. Mencken, etc., and the results were awful.

My experiences and impressions are the same as both of yours. I have one
trick I use on papers sometimes. I have my computer read the paper aloud.
I catch many errors that way, but perhaps not all of them, since the
pronunciation is a bit quirky. I use a female voice called "Victoria High
Quality" and the rendition is useful.

Donald's impressions of "grammar checkers" coincide with my own. It did
not take me more than one trial to discard each one I've tried.

Leigh