Two Simple Tips To Catch Editing Errors

I have two really simple tips that I’ve used for decades for catching errors in my articles and stories before sending them to my editors. Also as I don’t have an editor (yet) for my blog posts I have to do my own proofreading and editing to catch the most egregious of my writing errors.

Unless we are trained as professional proofreaders or have taken a lot of time to learn the techniques of proofreading we are not capable of catching most of the mistakes we make when writing.

I can spot an off by one error in a couple of thousand lines of source code just by glancing at it, and a friend of mine who has done work for my video game development company has a Masters in Publishing and has spent part of her past career editing science papers for various renowned scientists. She can spot a misplaced comma or a misspelled word or a hanging participle in hundreds of pages of text. Proofreading in code or text is a skill that can be learned and the more you expose yourself to the act of proofreading the more proficient you become at it.

I have a terrible habit that as I am writing I skip over words as I type. My brain says one thing, my fingers type something else. My brain is working faster than my fingers and my brain isn’t saying all of the words it wants to say so what I wanted to say and what I write are two different things. You always have to proofread carefully to ensure you didn’t out anything. (didn’t miss out anything.)

I’m used to working with editors at magazines who make it their job to catch my stupid usage mistakes. Unfortunately with a personal blog I don’t have that luxury, without an editor looking over my shoulder a lot more errors slip through. Editors are always happy with my submitted work and tell me how clean it is but when you are writing for a specific human being whom you have met in person and you know they are going to read your submission, you take greater care in your craft. When you are just slapping something on the blog, careful sentence construction sometimes takes a back seat to just banging out the words.

When I first started posting on my blog I was concentrating on the technical aspects of getting everything set up and working, the proofreading very much took a back seat. The editing on the first half dozen articles was dreadful and I had slipped out of my old habits of preparing articles for a human to read.

I was somewhat anguished by the piss poor editing and proofreading job I had done because I’ve come down hard on professional magazine editors pressed for time that have in the past churned up my perfectly understandable written work into something that looks like it was thrown together by arranging words randomly.

When I am reading someone else’s blog, if they have poor writing skills or sloppy editing, I leave pretty much in the first 30 seconds or so no matter how compelling their content appears to be. Bad writing just makes my brain itch.

Once the website was up and running and I was happy with most of it I went back at the end of the first week and read aloud my earlier posts, edited them for mistakes, and re-published the articles before anyone really noticed. Perhaps a hundred people in that first week paid attention. See? There is a reason not to have lots of traffic at the beginning!

Tip #1: Slowly read your article aloud.

When we read to ourselves using our “inner voice” we scan the text a lot more than we will admit to. Our eyes skip ahead, our inner voice fills in missing words, and our brain makes assumptions about what the sentence is trying to say and how it is going to say it.

After you’ve done all of your editing, sit down, clear your throat, and read your entire post aloud, to yourself. You need to read the title, the text, every heading, every bullet point, including the numbers or letters of the bullet point if they are indexed, every number and every word. Every word in a graphic image needs to be read too if you created it or you have the ability to fix any errors you may find.

I would say that this one simple technique can catch greater than 90% of the proofreading errors in your blog posts.

Before I hit that publish button, as part of my pre-post check off list , once I am convinced I am done with the editing of my final draft, I read aloud the entire article to ensure it is actually readable and before it goes live.

Tip #2: Keep a checklist.

For each post I create I have to proofread carefully, add in the Google AdSense code, schedule the date and time for a future posting, ensure that all the links are correct, any dependent files are uploaded, view the post in both Internet Explorer and Firefox and a half-dozen other small details.

Trying to track all of the micro-tasks I need to complete before an article goes live on my website couldn’t be done whilst in the throes of the creative process. There needs to be some systematised process that will track all of the minutiae for me whilst I get on with the writing. By maintaining a pre-post checklist I can ensure that even if I missed a few dotted I’s or several crossed T’s that at least 99% of the article will be correct, proper section headings are in place, and I’ve remembered that this time I need to set the article’s appropriate categories.

The checklist doesn’t need to be elaborate and it doesn’t need to change for each article. I’ve created a template page in Microsoft OneNote that sits right next to my monthly posting schedule. I use the template when a new month begins and I am collecting all of my ideas for posts together. After the checklist has been set up it becomes applicable to all of the articles I write from that point forward.

These two simple tips help me ensure that my articles and blog posts have most of the egregious errors taken care of. I hope that these tips can help you do the same on your blog too.