Your essay is the finished product of all your blood, sweat, and tears. By the time you submit it, your paper will have been read through approximately three times and thoroughly combed for errors. None the less, when you receive your carefully prepared document back and look at the margins, you see a few misspellings and repetitions that you didn’t notice before. Why is that?
Excessive Proofreading Doesn’t Work
Being thorough to the point of excess doesn’t work when you are reading your own words. Editing is especially scary when you know the person marking your paper will notice them. Nine times out of ten, the examiner will put any mistakes and typos down to laziness or stupidity, which is unfair.
Typos and misspellings get through our efforts at proofreading and editing because our brains are wired to do that. It’s because when you are writing an essay or dissertation, you not just writing a description, you’re trying to convey meaning and reasoning at the very highest level of your concentration. That’s why it is so easy to forget about periods when writing—our thoughts don’t have full stops.
How Your Brain Works
Your brain is only capable of generalizing things into their logical parts. When you write, it’s thinking about what letters to type to form the word in your mind. Then it has to combine those words into sentences, paragraphs, and sections. In addition to this, it has to convey complex ideas.
Anyone of those stages can go wrong from the thought and onto the page. Our brains are taking in vast amounts of sensory information, combining it, and extracting and constructing an essay out of it. When someone else reads what we have written, they don’t have the same number of processes going on in their brain, so they catch all the typos.
It actually means that they are using less brain power to read what we wrote, then we had to while composing, writing, and assembling it coherently onto a page.
Why Our Brain Can’t See the Typos
We are intimately connected with what we write. Our brains assume something to be there because it already has the layout imprinted on our memory. We expect it to be there, so our eyes skip over parts that are absent or incorrect.
Because it’s a continual fight between the version of writing that exists in our head, and the one that is tangible on the computer screen, many students, professionals, and job applicants rely on proofreading services. If you think after reading this: “I need someone to proofread my essay,” you can visit any number of online proofreading services and choose the best one.
The concentration levels needed to type a word correctly are very high. If you take the time to appreciate what your brain is doing for you, you will forgive the little mistakes it sometimes makes without you even being aware of it.
