Isn’t it odd? Doesn’t it seem that no matter how many times you edit your essay, short story, chapter or novel, you always find more errors when you look again?
The reason, of course, is that you know what you meant to say at any point in your story. This is true especially if you’ve gone over it a several times. You know what you meant when you wrote it, and you certainly know what you meant when you read it back.
I think it comes down to this. The mind gets bored. The mind gets tired. …and to fight off the boredom and fatigue, it just fills in the blanks for you. You know what you meant, you see what you meant. A vicious cycle, if ever there was.
Great. So, what’s the answer?
You may already know that reading your own work out loud uses a different set of mental muscles than does a sight-read. This, then, would be the first step. While reading aloud really helps–while it catches a great many additional mistakes, it still won’t catch them all.
You’re probably saying to yourself, “I don’t care. What are editors for?”
With the huge number of books finding their ways to slush piles each day, your manuscript needs to be as clean as it can be.
Well, if you can’t count on your own sight-read, and reading aloud still has the potential for leaving errors in the manuscript, what do you do?
When it comes down to it, I do have a suggestion, and I wrote about it in an earlier post. Read, “It Takes Two: The One on One Method for one method to insure your work is clean and ready.
There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio... and isn't it time you experienced some of them?
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