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.