Five brain hacks for tricking yourself into seeing text with fresh eyes are covered in this episode, an adaptation of my post on the now-defunct the now-defunct Copyediting. While originally written for editors, these tips can help writers editing their own writing too; they are ways to trick your eyes into seeing what is actually there rather than what your mind thinks should be there.
Press play below to listen to this 6:35 min archived podcast episode or right-click on it to download the file.
TL;DR—The Five Tips
1. Have the computer read the page aloud.
This is the tech twist on the “pair reading” strategy used by proofreaders. It activates the listening part of your brain, and makes you interpret the words anew. And the computer won’t skip a single word or fill in any missing ones. Macs have this feature built into the accessibility options, Acrobat will do it for PDFs too. Look for “speech” in the system preferences.
2. Change the font to Comic Sans.
Any dramatic font change will help you see the words in a new way. You could also change just the colour of the font, or the background page colour. If you change the font by modifying the “normal” style, it’s easier to undo the change, and this causes fewer styling snafus, but Word’s Immersive Reader makes this risk free. Even just changing the margin width can have a dramatic effect.
Looking at only 1–3 lines of text at a time can also help this. You might select a couple lines at a time, so Word makes them stand out. The “focus” function in Word’s “immersive reader” can do this. But beware that many of these functions give Microsoft permission to use the content to train it’s AI, which may violate your contractual duty to protect and keep the material private.
3. Chunk the editing tasks.
Sweep through the manuscript doing one task at a time: run your macros, then set all head styles, then vet trouble words, then check all captions; read only the first line of every paragraph to check the overall structure and flow. You get the idea. Here’s a longer post with a suggested workflow.
4. Read pages out of order.
To make sure she doesn’t miss anything, Wendy Toole is an editor who uses this strategy: “I [go] through it reading every page ending in zero, then every page ending in one, and so on, till I had covered it completely … and found several more bloopers!”
UPDATE: I have been using this method when pressed for time, as a final triage stage instead of reading front-to-back. (Hoping it will at least not mean missing the whole end of the document.) It seems to go faster and keep my focus more intense! Not once have I not made it to the set of pages ending in 9. This doesn’t work for structural stages and similar, but it’s great for proofreading and copyediting, and even for stylistic or line editing sometimes. This also has the benefit of ensuring that all remaining errors don’t clump up at the end of the file, where you reached “correction fatigue.”
5. Take a break.
Really. Editing is hard, demanding, often thankless. If you don’t feel the need to attack the day with a style sheet, you should find something else to do for a bit.
What do you do to see the words anew? Leave your comments below.
Mentioned in this episode:
First and second episodes: Error Rates in Editing: What’s Your Save Percentage? and How many errors trigger a book reprint? (Spoilers: data shows 95% is the best humanly possible (NOT a “standard”) and, to answer the second question: hardly ever!)
Read more about using colour to spot typos and what to triage when time is just too tight.
The image for this episode is by chrisbb, used under CC BY 2.0 license.
