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proofreading lament



I am extremely blind to the typographical errors in my writing, and when
writing email posts I am quite incapable of detecting a significant
fraction of them while proofreading before their submission. I just now
noticed more embarrassing typos in my last post *correcting* a couple of
the most egregious errors in a previous post that seemed to be laced with
them. For some reason it is only *after* I submit a post that I can
detect the typos that appear in my copy of the post that the list server
sends out. Having a spell checker in my mail program might allow me to
catch the most of the spelling typos, but it wouldn't do anything for the
word deletions, word insertions into the wrong place, etc..

I suspect that the one thing that I could do that would most help the
situation is to submit *shorter posts*. That didn't seem to work on my
last erratum post though. Maybe I should just submit nothing until I
have my (English major) wife read through what I wrote, but this would
not help the cause of domestic tranquility.

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

Besides accidently deleting the word 'amplitude' from between 'few degrees'
and "on the slight", I accidently got the period wrong here. ...
^^^^^^
Should say 'orientation' not 'slight', and 'accidently' is properly spelled
'accidentally'.

1. I accidentally misquoted the exponents for a couple of numbers I got
^^^
Should be 2. not 1.

David Bowman
dbowman@gtc.georgetown.ky.us