“The darker shade of grey is China, while the lighter one is India. This data is of 2010, of course, and I hope that an updated chart ill tell a better story.”
That’s a sentence from a post I wrote earlier this week, and therein lies a tail.
I am very, very good at one thing, and I am, a lass, very, very bad at another. What am I good at? I am good at typos. It doesn’t matter if I’m swiping away on my phone or typing away on my keyboard, I will generate typos. I guarantee at least one per paragraph in today’s post, by the way.
And not just typos! Sometimes, I’ll skip an entire word, like I did in that first sentence up above. “This data is of 2010”, it seems. What an as I am for having forgotten the word “as”!
And on other occasions, when I’m feeling lazy about making mistakes, I’ll skip just one letter. Why mother with an entire word when a single letter can bet the job done? And that’s why that same sentence has the word “ill” when it clearly should have been “will”. Sow it goes.
I try to get better, I assure you. It’s not as if I’m proud of how bad I am at proofreading (and regular reader will no just how bad I am!). I use the inbuilt spell-check service that Google Chrome offers, and unless it is a rush job, I try and do a second read after correcting all the errors that spell-check has spotted.
But this is thwarted in two ways. One, more often than knot, it just is a rush job, and I don’t have time to proofread. That’s not an excuse, to be clear, not is it a defence (or should it be defense? Gah!). I try and write daily, and sometimes I fail. When I succeed, it is often by thumping out a post on the run. And secondly, the error often isn’t a spelling error that can be spotted without context. The phrase “ill tell a better story” is wrong, off course. It should read “will tell a better story”. But such contextual mistakes will sometimes be picked up by the software, and other times it won’t.
And when they don’t get picked up, much mirth can ensue. I was working on a different project recently, and needed to type inn the phrase “a lens”. My fingers decided to skip the usage of the spacebar, and I ended up typing “alens”. And spell-check, god bless its sole, decided to autocorrect it to “aliens”. This was picked up by a person who reviewed my work, thank god, but this surely cannot continue. How to get better at either reducing the number of typos I generate, or at spotting them ones I’ve generated ?
I have five suggestions for myself (and feel free to let me know if your able to help me out with more):
- Give yourself at list fifteen minutes away from the computer before you do the proofreading. A fresh pair of eyes may help.
- Read the whole thing twice. Trice, if you can afford the time.
- Highlight each sentence as you go along, maybe? Who nose, that could reduce the errors?
- Take a printouts and read those, rather than reading on the screen? Yes, that will waist some paper, but you can always reuse that peace of paper later!
- Get AI to do this for you? Bye the way, today’s title was generated by AI on my request, and slightly modified to make it even better.
I do need too get better, that much is for sure. So if, in the posts to come, you spot any errors yourself, please do let me know. I’ll write an update some months down the line to this post, and I do hope that post ill tell a better story!
I counted twenty-three today, by the way. You?
EconForEverybody 