While Dr. Tanya, who hosts Blogging Insights, is on a hiatus, Sadje thought that she could host discussions about our experiences and expectations regarding blogging on Blogging Platform.
Today’s topic is about editing your posts. Sadje says…
Editing is a very important part of blogging, if not the most important part of blogging.
I agree with Sadje that proofreading a post before publishing it is almost as critical as creating it in the first place. And I try to — believe me, I try — to proofread every post before I publish it. But I’m horrified when I go back and read some of my published posts and see typos, misspelling, misuse, bad punctuation, missing words, or duplicate words.
I’ve boiled the problem down to one thing: a design flaw in human evolution. Do you want to know what it is? Okay, I’ll tell you.
Your eyes see what your brain expects them to see.
I can be proofreading something and to anyone else reading my draft, my error is obvious. But to me, if my brain expected to see the word “they’re” in the context of the sentence, that’s what my eyes see, despite the fact that the word written on my screen is actually “there.”
I’ve asked my wife if she would be my proofreader. But she always laughs and laughs and then goes back to her crossword puzzle.
I do have the Grammarly keyboard app on my iPhone, but I prefer to use the native keyboard that comes with my iPhone. Maybe I should just bite the bullet and use the Grammarly keyboard and hope it does a better job than my eyes do in catching errors.
By the way, I encourage readers who come across a typo, misspelling, punctuation, or other grammatical faux pas to let me know so that I may make the correction.
Of course, sometimes that can backfire. I remember in a post using the phrase, “I couldn’t care less.” A woman wrote in a comment, “It’s ‘I could care less’ not ‘couldn’t.’ Common error.”
I responded by writing, “I hate to be argumentative, but you’re very wrong about could and couldn’t care less. Logically, if you COULD care less, it means you do care some and could care more. But saying that you COULDN’T care less means that you don’t care at all. So my usage was not an error. It was absolutely accurate.”
She and I got into a multi-comment battle on “couldn’t” versus “could” care less that went on for a dozen or more rounds with her insisting that she was correct and I was wrong. Of course, given that the name of her blog was “Better Off with Trump,” I wasn’t surprised.
This, That, and the Other 
It is more likely we see errors in other people’s work than our own. When I look at another piece of work, I can spot mistakes. I couldn’t spot a full stop missing in my own.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Totally agree and you are correct about the care less. Reminds me of irregardless😂👍🏻
Sent from Yahoo Mail for iPhone
LikeLiked by 1 person
That is why we are so bad at proofreading our own work. We are usually better at proofreading other people’s work. It’s why people are able to read things with many typos, misplaced words (sometimes my fingers type words that aren’t the same as I meant), “write” when you meant “right” and so much more. English’s tendency towards homonyms is also a problem. Other languages don’t do that nearly as much. Sometimes we have homonyms that are SPELLED the same but are pronounced differently. And we wonder why people have trouble learning English. It’s a very complicated language where most of the rules only apply sometimes.
LikeLiked by 2 people
Haha! That last incident was hilarious! Using double negative can be confusing for some! As to using Grammarly keyboard versus the original keyboard on your iPhone- you just click on the options of keyboard after writing and use the Grammarly to check each block. Thanks for sharing your thoughts
LikeLiked by 1 person
Great suggestion. Thanks, Sadje.
LikeLiked by 1 person
You’re welcome
LikeLiked by 1 person
You’re right about seeing what we want to see. I write (and proofread) most of my longer posts in Word and then copy and paste into the WordPress editor. I often find errors in WP that I didn’t see in Word. Maybe it’s the different font, I don’t know. My wife used to proofread my posts, but that created an even earlier deadline for me to complete the post.
LikeLiked by 1 person
She couldn’t care less what you had to say, I think. Oh well
LikeLiked by 1 person
I hope she shut her pie hole with the argumentative comments! In the end, we’re all human, and mistakes are bound to happen!
LikeLiked by 1 person