I wrote a post earlier in response to today’s one-word prompt, “underdog.” When I first started the post, I was going to use the idiom, “no dog in the race,” but when I looked at it on my draft after typing the words, it didn’t look right. So I Googled it.
Sure enough, the actual expression is “no dog in the fight.” I’m not a fan of dog fighting, so I didn’t want to use that. I suppose I could have used “no dog in the hunt,” which is related to fox hunting, but I’m not a fan of that “sport” either.
So I finally settled on “no horse in the race.” But when I changed the text from “no dog in the race” to “no horse in the race,” I actually typed “no race in the race.”
One would think that, after proofreading the draft multiple times before hitting “Publish,” I would have caught that error and corrected it. But while my eyes read “no race in the race,” my brain saw what it thought I typed, which was “no horse in the race.”
So there was my error for the whole world to see. Well, that infinitesimally small fraction of the whole world that reads my blog, anyway. And I didn’t yet realize it until my blogging buddy, Jim Adams over at A Unique Title For Me, read my post and commented, “Change the first race to horse.” Thanks Jim. I made that change and I do appreciate you pointing it out.
But I still don’t feel better about having made that error in the first place and then not catching it myself while proofreading. I really need to do a better job of proofreading my posts before pushing them out.
And yes, I’m a bit OCD about this. What can I say, except that I will try to do better.
This, That, and the Other 
I hope that you will correct some of my errors one day.
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You gotta make ‘em before I can correct ‘em!
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We may aim for perfection, but we never make it no matter how hard we try.
One of my methods (and you can see it doesn’t always work) is the change the font and size and paper layout for the proofreading. And read it aloud, so you can ‘hear’ the repetition (assuming you aren’t mute – then use the ‘read-voice’ on the app).
it’s still funny – but not when it happens to me!
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I’ll have to try the reading aloud method. Thanks.
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Proofing, pfft. I typically proof three times before posting, and once after posting. For some reason, once it’s been blogged, my vision is more clear. That’s when I find my errors. Once I wrote a long story about my brothers. At the last minute, I had second thoughts about using their names, so I did a find and replace. I blogged the story without rereading it and my replace only covered the 2nd half of the story. So all the names changed mid-way through. A reader told me hours later.
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