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.method good another is backwards copy hard the Reading
If you have the time, put your creation away for a month before you look
at it again. "Who wrote this garbage??!?"
Sometime I'll read material aloud to my wife. There are usually two or
three errors in half a dozen paragraphs, such as "to" for "too" or "of"
for "or" and I'll catch them as I pronounce them. Occasionally she'll
remark to me about an error of fact or a poor explanation. I guess she's
just smarter than I am.
Oh, there's an error in the paragraph above. I'll send an invisible pony
to the first to find it.
When I worked for a newspaper and we were setting the "legals" into type
we used formal proofreading, where one person reads the typeset copy aloud
to another who holds the typewritten original. "To cap arthur cap
lessingham L E S S I N G H A M of parts unknown colon, cap a petition has
been entered in cap cambridge cap district cap court for the termination
of ..." The legals are ads for tax takings, probate, etc. Occasionally we
would discover an error in the original, and would call the appropriate
lawyer or court for clarification. An error in the publication of a legal
ad invalidates the required publication, resulting in rescheduling of a
court date and (more importantly) no payment to the newspaper for the ad.
One other method is available to users of Unix or Linux:
tr " " "\n" <sourcefile|sort -u|>outputfile
That Unix shell command turns all spaces into newlines, so there's one
word per line. It then sorts into an alphabetical list of words,
eliminating any duplicates. Examination of the results can reveal the
presence of unexpected words, overlooked in previous readings because they
seemed correct in their original context.
On Sat, 01 Nov 2014 23:46:51 -0400, Keith Hood <klhra -at- yahoo -dot- com> wrote:
I wish my stuff were checked by an editor. When you see something too
often it begins to fall off your radar.
One way to get around that is to print it and check it in hard copy. I
find it makes a real difference, maybe because that way I can proof it
under conditions other than standard work conditions. Reading it at
different times, or in a different place, helps refocus my thinking.
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