Ruth Zavitz, along with critique group attendees Paula Carr and John Hitchens have just recommend Self-editing For Fiction Writers
.
.I found self-editing to be a very slippery slope, since the eye and brain are wired to jump over mistakes and see what should be on the page instead of what is.
Had the text-to-speech software TextAloud2 been around back then, I would have used it to listen to my book for an audio proofread and catch those mistakes, but it wasn't.
I remember an email that circulated years ago. It was full of misspellings, but the joke was that no reader saw them until he or she got to the end and the misspellings were pointed out. I remember I found it shocking.
But the brain is very clever and an expert at making sense of misspelled words. All it needs is for the first and last letter of a word to be correct and it will fill in the rest, especially if you're tired, bored, or have gone over a manuscript so many times you know it by heart.
But the brain is very clever and an expert at making sense of misspelled words. All it needs is for the first and last letter of a word to be correct and it will fill in the rest, especially if you're tired, bored, or have gone over a manuscript so many times you know it by heart.
According to researchers at the University of Toronto, as reported in an article in Science Daily:
Posts
