Can You Find The Mistake

Thanks to Scrivener I’ve learnt a new way to up my proofing game. I have great difficulty proofing my own work. A written piece is never finished and there is always something that could be changed. To turn of the part of my brain that wants to re-write the whole thing and keep the part of my brain that proof-reads seems to be impossible.

It’s so much easier to proof-read someone else’s work but even then the brain is very tricky.  For instance, it’s often pointed out that as long as you keep the first and second letter of a word the same you can swap the middle ones around and people still get the message. When I’m in auto-pilot I breeze through these kinds of errors.

And then if a word is missing the mind is quite happy to fill in the blank without even asking for credit. It’s also fine with skipping over the double words as as well (see what I did there?). I have a theory it stores those double words for the instances when the word is missing. There is a special part of the brain that holds these reserves and you only notice the mistake if your reserves are low. I guess that means if the reserves are full then you do you notice the double words.

Either way my brain had great trouble trying to find the mistake in this little poser:

I actually googled the question to find the answer. Yes, I’m ashamed. When proofing my own work I’ve found Scrivener an invaluable piece of kit. Within the edit menu there is an option called speech which will read out the text for me. For some reason my ears aren’t connected to the same inner editor my eyes are which means I spot far more mistakes. Misspelled words may look fine but they sound awful. That goes for bad grammar and redundant words too. It’s really helped shape my work.

Just another fantastic feature of Scrivener I wanted to share.