Ever Surprised by Your Own Errors?

Sure! Every single freakin' time. You get blind to the mistakes. It's God's way of saying, "Get thee a beta!"

Oh, definitely. That's why there are so many 'tricks' out there to help a writer when editing; such as reading the work out loud, changing the font, editing a printout, etc. All are designed to help you take a bit fresher look at things and hopefully you'll catch stuff you missed.

This happens to me all the time. Every time I go over a manuscript, no matter how many times I've corrected it, I will find something wrong with the piece.

Guaranteed.

But like others have pointed out, reading your work out loud is one great way of finding more errors, although it can get tiresome. Also, if you get impatient, your reading out loud might do you little to no good. If you become impatient, you may end up speed-reading (I've done this on numerous occasions) and going over words that are misspelled but that you would think you would never be guilty of misspelling. Because of this, be careful when re-reading your own work, even out loud.

Actually, my own stupidity has ceased to surprise me. I feel that's a step forward.

Yup. I must have betas. I proof and read aloud and stuff, but my betas always catch stuff. I'm dyslexic, although I can spot errors in other's work. Just not my own.

Sigh.

I was working on a non-fiction thing once for someone else, and a rather long Greek religious title (can't remember which one exactly ) got auto changed in Word to 'Prophylactic', in numerous places.

I didn't find it until an hour before I hit send ....

narnia said:

I was working on a non-fiction thing once for someone else, and a rather long Greek religious title (can't remember which one exactly ) got auto changed in Word to 'Prophylactic', in numerous places.

I didn't find it until an hour before I hit send ....

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Oh dear. That must have been such fun, changing everything back the right way.

I get the same thing with OpenOffice Writer. Its default setting is to AutoCorrect, and I am going to have to go in, probably tomorrow when I write my short story second draft, so I can change it.

And I will likely forget about the needed changes until I've spelled one of the fantasy names in the piece (maybe even the title -- oh joy!) and have it changed as I type it.


An error I found in my present WIP, actually occurred while I typed on the Olympia. I wanted to write the word 'designed'. I did not think about the spelling as I typed it, until I realized I had put too many letters in. I had to quickly strike out the word 'disegnigned' and then re-spell it properly behind it. (That's what I get for not having any of that black ribbon with the correctable stuff on the bottom, but it's definitely good for writing first drafts; makes me have to think, which I like!)

zahra said:

Actually, my own stupidity has ceased to surprise me. I feel that's a step forward.

Click to expand...

That I can definitely get on board with.

zahra said:

Actually, my own stupidity has ceased to surprise me. I feel that's a step forward.

Click to expand...

Yes, I learned a long time ago to never underestimate my capacity to err.

I once said that I'd made two errors in my life. The first was the actual error, the second was to admit it.

Every so often, I'll be writing a sentence (usually describing something unusual) and I'll spend so much time thinking how to word it that I forget to make it a whole sentence. I've put two sentence fragments in my old novella-in-a-drawer that way.

It was depressing. To err is human... to write is divine-ish. Sorta. Kinda. Sometimes.