No matter how many times you read your own work, you can keep missing simple typos, spelling mistakes, and other errors because the writer reads what he thought he wrote. It’s a trick our brains play on us. That’s why we need help from folks like Wendy Janes.
Why can’t you successfully proofread your own work?
It’s very simple – you read what you expect to see.
When you read other people’s work it’s fresh and new. Any errors seem to leap from the page, as the following examples demonstrate:
“Perdita was so angry she felt like throwing the laptop out of the the attic window.”
“Mark was fifty-five minutes younger that Spencer. An injustice than irritated him no end.”
The errors in the above sentences look so obvious. However, when you’ve been working on your book for months, maybe longer, and you’ve re-worked, revised, edited, tweaked, fallen in and out of love with it more times than you can remember, it’s almost impossible to gain the professional distance that is required to proofread it effectively. This is no reflection on your skills as a writer.
I’d like to share my own (humbling) experience. You see, I’d been…
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