Minor, Embarrassing Blog Errors

I don't know whether or not you, the reader of this article, have your own blog or not. But if you do, you may be like me in that I like to occasionally go back and read previous blog articles I've written. And for the most part, I come away from my reading trip into the past with the eerie feeling that someone else wrote my stuff; I would not have been capable of it. But then something often appears to jerk me back into reality and convince myself of their true authorship.

That "something" is a goofup in my word usage or grammar that I should have picked up before my original publication. After all, I usually check over each article five or six times (along with spell check) before publishing it. Even after publication, I will often miss a mistake while re-reading it. But then I'll suddenly discover an error and be thoroughly embarrassed for a couple of minutes while I go about correcting it. While doing this, I am usually wondering how many people from different parts of the world noticed it and came to the conclusion that I was a completely uneducated doofus/klutz!

This leads me to wonder whether or not it would be more effective to have another proof-read my articles instead of doing it myself. For when I read my own work, I am reading it as my mind would want it to appear, not necessarily as it actually is. I've discovered the same phenomenon when proof-reading papers written by my wife or my children. They will have already checked their own work and then let me look at it, with me pointing out various obvious mistakes that they overlooked. It's almost as if, in the act of writing, we mentally save a copy of our product. And when reading what we've actually written, we instead read our intended product instead of what is actually on the screen or the paper.

I am definitely not of the same writing ilk as that of the late science fiction legend Robert Heinlein, who once claimed that he was so confident about his writing that he never went back over his manuscripts once he had written them; he would just send them straight to his publisher. But then again, I don't know that his publisher didn't employ some folks who discretely polished up the self-assured legend's rough spots!