Tip of the Week

March 4, 2019

Read Your Writing Backwards… And Other Editing Tips

Did you catch the mistake in the first word of last week’s Tip? Kudos if you did —  we did not! So this week we’re sharing a few tips for editing writing.

  1. Get a second set of eyes on it. The writer often continually misses her own mistakes.
  2. Read it out loud. Small errors that would otherwise go unnoticed (both by the writer and even spell check) are more likely to become apparent when spoken out loud.
  3. Read it backwards. This may seem silly, but your brain knows what you meant to write and can skip over mistakes. Reading it backwards forces the writer to read the work more carefully.
(We’ve corrected the error and you won’t find it anywhere except in your old email, so if you’re interested: we went to press with the first word written as “They” rather than “The.”)