It’s easy to proofread someone else’s work. Each sentence is new and fresh, and it didn’t start inside your own head. You can read it far more objectively. But when it’s your own writing …
You already know what you’re talking about. You understand the concepts, for one, and all of the background information that you might not have actually included here. You can throw in phrases like “the Swanson Marginalia” or “the Macnaghten Memoranda” because hey, you know what they mean. And when your eyes rove over your own sentences, your brain is more than willing to argue that it’s actually read all of the missing words.
The best option is clearly to have someone who’ll carefully read over your writing and find all of those pesky mistakes. Editors and peer reviewers can help you catch the major things. But for a piece that isn’t either edited or peer reviewed, when you have to make sure it’s presentable all on your own … what can you do?
- Let it sit. If you have time between when you finish writing it and when it’s due, let it sit. Print it off and make sure it’s saved in a couple different places so you can’t lose it, but put it aside for as long as you can. You can never come back to your writing with entirely fresh eyes, but at least you won’t be as caught up in the actual writing of the piece when you come back to it.
- Make Word read it to you. You can force yourself to go slow, sentence by sentence, and even read it out loud to yourself, but you can still skim over missing or similar words. Word has “Read Aloud” (under “Review”) and while it’s not the most expressive reader, it will only read what you actually have on the page. This is a good way to catch similar words, missing words, or that pesky sentence that just doesn’t make sense.
- Read it one sentence at a time … backward. This is time-consuming and I’ve only done it after editors have signed off on the overall flow of a piece so I know it makes sense, because this isn’t reading for sense. It’s dissecting your work so that you can’t fall into a flow and anticipate what comes next. Working backward means you have to concentrate on this sentence and just this sentence.
And of course, if all else fails … go back and read what you wrote after you hit “submit.” After all, we’re all bound by Gaiman’s Law:
“Picking up your first copy of a book you wrote, if there’s one typo, it will be on the page that your new book falls open to the first time you pick it up.”
Rebecca Frost 