Any time I prepare something to be published – an email, a presentation, or one of these blogs, I’ll look it over carefully for typos and other issues before hitting the big red button. And invariably after publishing, I find some obvious issue I somehow missed. The issue is attention and focus. Over time our minds become accustomed to the work, and start to take shortcuts that miss normally obvious errors.
A way to break this cycle is to make the work unfamiliar again.When reviewing your writing – change the appearance of the work – the font and size, maybe even the color. This helps trick your brain into treating the material like it’s new. It helps teases the issues to the surface.
It certainly isn’t perfect—I’m sure I missed some typos in this very post. But it’s worth a try.