Look with new eyes

How to catch errors you might otherwise miss

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Before Breakfast, a production of iHeartRadio. Good Morning,
This is Laura. Welcome to the Before Breakfast podcast. Today's
tip is to look with new eyes. Whenever you are
working on something important, try to give it a final

(00:24):
review in a slightly different format than you have reviewed
it before. You just might catch something your old eyes
didn't see. No matter how skilled and careful a proofreader
you are, you can miss things. Our brains have a
way of reading what was meant instead of what was written.

(00:47):
This comes in handy if you're trying to get the
gist of a text a friend dictated while driving, or
if you are reading the letter that your first grade
nephew wrote you all by himself. But this feature of
our brains is no, I'm not so helpful when we
are looking at something we created, specially if we've been
looking at it for a while. You've read that last

(01:09):
paragraph three times. You know what it says, but do you.
I can speak from personal experience with embarrassing typos that
know you do not necessarily know what it says. Our
eyes can glaze over after a while. So the trick
to catching errors is to look at whatever we have

(01:30):
created with new eyes. One easy way to do this
is to put a little space between your first review
and your final review. A day or more is good,
though I know that's not really reasonable for short things,
but an hour would be nice. Write that important email
before lunch, save it as a draft, and then review

(01:53):
it after lunch. Maybe you will see that you repeated
the word the Probably not a deal killer, but best
not to let it happen. Another trick is to print
out the document or switch the font or type size.
Your subsequent reading experience will be different enough from your

(02:15):
previous editing experience that you may catch something you missed
before In a different font or type size. That word
that was at the end of the line may no
longer be at the end of the line, which means
that you will see that your sentence doesn't make quite
as much sense as you thought it did. Finally, reading

(02:36):
what you wrote out loud, either from the screen or
from a hard copy, can be wise too. Even if
the piece is designed to be read silently, reading out
loud may draw your attention to any awkward phrasings and
the overall flow of the text. It will also slow
you down, which may let you catch any typos that

(03:00):
have slipped by thus far. I spend much of my
work time writing, and I'm pretty good at catching my mistakes.
But I never regret giving an important document a final
review with new eyes. It's not a waste of time. Indeed,
sometimes it saves time When the final document is more clear.

(03:25):
People know what you intend, so you spend less time explaining,
and that is a big win. In the meantime. This
is Laura. Thanks for listening, and here's to making the
most of our time. Thanks for listening to Before Breakfast.

(03:51):
If you've got questions, ideas, or feedback, you can reach
me at Laura at Laura vandercam dot com. Before Breakfast
is a production of iHeartMedia. For more podcasts from iHeartMedia,
please visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you

(04:13):
listen to your favorite shows.