Tuesday, June 7, 2022

TYPOS and PROOFREADING

 Working on becoming a better writer is one thing. Then, we have to work on becoming better proofreaders.

 

Not proofreading well is a pesky problem of mine. It’s one of those I don’t  see what I don’t see. Of course, much more so for my own writing and ever more if the proofreading comes minutes after writing.

 

Standard advice is to put writing aside and look at it later, as in days/months later. This is not practical for posts responding to online forums or for emails.

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Relying on Microsoft WORD or GRAMMARLY (insert any other spell/grammar check of your choice) is foolish. They catch some things, miss many, and misdirect often.

 

Let’s face it; some people are excellent proofreaders. Some of them become editors because of this advantage. But many superb writers confess they aren’t blessed with the proofreading brain. 

{Yup. I *just* had to correct "proofreading" above,👆 because I had typed "prrofreading." 😬 }

 

An excellent beta reader gave me a helpful suggestion, which I have found to reduce my rate of typos. In addition, it catches echoes; those repeat words coming too close together in a paragraph. 

{I like this egregious example of echo: "She looked at him. "Look at it," she said. "When I last looked it didn't look half as bad as it looks now." 😰 }

 

It’s the text-to-voice feature, where a mechanical voice reads highlighted text back to you. It’s better than my reading aloud, (something I also do) because when reading my own words, I often read what I thought I wrote and not what’s on the screen/page.

 

Here is what this feature looks like in WORD. Other writing platforms have similar functions, though you’d have to find them yourself because I only use WORD. I red-penciled it on the upper left:

In addition to catching echoes, this device is literally an echo. It, too, isn’t perfect. You won’t catch homonyms with it. But if you haven’t tried it, you will be pleasantly surprised at how helpful this editing feature is.


6 comments:

Evelyn said...

Sounds like a great suggestion. From my observation, you've definitely gotten much better with your proofreading over the years. And I've definitely gotten much worse at making typos no matter what format I'm writing in. So, any of you who read things I post, please give me grace. :)

Vijaya said...

Mirka, I realized with Bound what a horrible proofreader I am. The manuscript went through copyediting and I decided to revise a bit more and ended up introducing plenty more typos into the ms. I had to have it copyedited again to catch the mistakes. There are two still that I've not corrected...because so many new things to write.

I only discovered the text-to-speech mode in Word a couple of years ago. Now, I find it's the single, most useful feature that helps me catch typos. Thanks for highlighting this useful tool.

Janie Junebug said...

I have always considered myself to be a good proofreader, but sometimes I take a later look at something I wrote years before and am shocked by my errors.

Love,
Janie

MirkaK said...

Even people who are good proofreaders miss things. No one is perfect. No digital system is perfect either, no matter what techies say.

Barbara Etlin said...

Thanks for this tip.

This is why I hired a professional proofreader for my self-published book. Those pesky typos sneak in when you're not looking!

Mirka Breen said...

Oh, Barbara-- Mine even sneak in when I *am* looking :,=(