I am teh matter of tyos.
Oof. Let me try that again.
I am the master of typos.
That’s not to say that I don’t proofread my own work. Quite the opposite. I poofread. Make that proofread. And I use spellcheck. And I read it allowed. Correction: that should be aloud.
The problem is that I have a block when it comes to my own writing. I know what I meant to type. My brain is often able to substitute the correction for the mistake in my own writing. And I’m not the only writer who has this problem. This is actually quote — nope, quite — a common phenomenon. As our fingers work quickly on the keyboard, we make typos, but our brains substitute what we meant to write in for the mistake. Even when we go back to edit ourselves, we still see what we intended rather than what we actually typed.
Despite this, I’ve worked as an editor several times, and I’m fantastic at finding the errors in the writing of others. Why? Because it’s not my writing. I don’t know the words they intended to write; I only see what is in front of me on the page, so I can look at it without my brain substituting in the completed or corrected picture.
There’s actually a lot of brain science behind this, and was a much discussed topic in the media in 2014 when psychology researcher Dr. Tom Stafford of The University of Sheffield performed a typing experiment using 19 subjects who could see neither the keyboard nor the screen. He found the subjects slowed down just before they made typos. In interview after interview — from Wired to Insider, he said over and over again that we can’t see our own typos because we type from a routine, and we know what we intended to say.
It’s essentially based upon the same principles of how we learn to read. First we learn letters; then we learn words. Eventually, we’re told to read a whole sentence for meaning, content and context. So we take a whole sentence at a time, not each individual word. In fact, often times, our brains skip over a word here or there and fill in the “blanks.”
When I took on a self-funded reporting project in 2011, the first thing I did was find an editor. I knew that if I was going to be writing the articles for “The Night Shift Project,” I couldn’t be my own editor. I hired author, journalist and editor Jeff Fleischer to edit the project because I knew that I was going to miss my own typos and my tense disagreements. I wanted a professional to get out the red pen and take a critical eye to my reporting, catch the errant comma and put it in its proper place.
The best newspapers actually have a wool — correction: whole — department within the newsroom set up just to make sure reporters are putting out clean copy. It’s called the copy desk, and it’s made of a special group of people called copy editors who know language, spelling and style guides better than anyone else in the newsroom. These gurus of grammar are the human dictionaries and thesauruses. And they wield a (often digital) red pen with no mercy.
So what does it really take to put out clean copy in a newspaper? It’s a team approach, of course. It’s the reporters who report and write the stories and self-edit; the copy editors who go through the articles letter by letter, word by word; and the editors who go through articles for readability, factuality, etc.
On that note, where’s my red pen? I think I sea a few mitakes in hear.