The Impossible Task

Saving the planet? Stopping the horrendous strife in the Middle East? Getting enough undecided voters in swing states to cast their ballots for Kamala?

All worthy contenders for the title of this post, but no. In the last week or so, my existential-stress meter shot way past maximum, shattering my ability to compose coherent, moral/political outrage-related posts. No, the impossible task to which I refer is that of proofreading one’s own writing.

I’ve long known it can’t be done. Indeed, at times, the impossibility of the task has allowed me to make a living (or at least pay a few bills) by proofreading other people’s work. Lately, though, this unavoidable literary tripwire has been blowing up so many of my precious sentences in my face, I had to find out – what the actual f*ck is going in our brains that we can look at the same glaring error a dozen times and not see it at all?

I’ve spent the last several months (half-a-year?) getting my 1995 Celtic fantasy Hunter of the Light into a publishable file format. It’s Step #1 of a plan to send it into the world again, where someone can read it, should someone care to. (Well, Step #2, actually, but I’m not in the mood to digress.) Yes, I did have digital backups of the book, but they didn’t make it through our 2012 house fire. Even if they had, Hunter is 30 years old. Transferring files from floppy disk to my current PC would have presented its own set of challenges.

For a hefty chunk of change, printed matter – like the used paperback of Hunter I got off Amazon for a couple of bucks – can be converted into a digital file. Only drawback, the process is prone to producing errors. When I learned the end product would almost certainly have mistakes on every page, I decided I’d convert Hunter myself by retyping the book into a WORD doc.

A big task, fer shure, but I was committed to going over the text a word at a time anyway. When Hunter was being prepped for publication in ’95, the copyeditor assigned to my work fixed the “errors” in my final draft by translating all the Irish-esque dialect into standard American English, straightening out the many instances where I’d intentionally bent syntactical rules, and revising my orthographic variations (marvellous, draught, gaol, etc.) to align with preferred American spellings.

My limited time with the galleys (final proof-sheets, an author’s last chance to alter text before a work goes to print) was spent scrawling “stet” over the crucial bits the copyeditor had deleted or changed, having missed that those bits were the stylistic soul of my novel. Peering through the many-thousand “stet” scrawls to unearth typos, missing words, and misplaced punctuation was largely a bust. Hunter went to print laden with minor mistakes I’ve been eager to fix for three decades. As the list of errata I’d compiled had also burnt to ash in 2012, the only way to find the errors again was to fine-tooth comb the text line-by-line.

Another plus, retyping the book would make it easy to tweak the things that needed tweaking in order to maintain consistency between the world of Hunter and that of its (already-written) sequel. Minor stuff. Turning a beech-wood chest into an elm-wood chest, substituting spindle for poplar, nixing “yes” and “no” as responses to direct questions … a scant handful of changes to ensure that Éirinn the Younger and Éirinn the Elder are one and the same place.

Well aware I’d be adding new errors even as I eliminated old ones, I set myself the lofty goal of handing my future proofreader a clean, if not pristine, file of the book. My method was to type one paragraph at a time – at a wpm rate well under my usual speed – and then read the paragraph I’d just typed, often aloud, doing my best to read word-by-word.

I caught so many errors, both my own (rely, instead of “reply”) and in the paperback (on mountain, instead of “on the mountain”), I got cocky. When I reached the end of the story, I went back to read the opening again, expecting to find the prose clean as a whistle, imagining I’d have a moment to pat myself on the back for a job well done before moving on to the appendices and glossaries.

First page of text, five mini-paragraphs in, I discovered that rather than flinging himself onto the slope in pursuit of the White Stag, my hero had flung himself onto the slop.

A lesson in humility. Clearly, I needed to carefully proofread the whole dang thing. So I did, and caught a million more errors. Then I ran a bunch of global searches to ensure I’d corrected every appearance of some annoyingly persistent goofs. Not only had I missed a few, the searches uncovered a number of goofs I wasn’t looking for and should have caught already.

Believing those globals had surely rendered me a squeaky-clean copy, I resolved to do just two more Find/Replaces, one in pursuit of Irish words my fingers might have mangled, and the other to root out wrong-way facing apostrophes. Then I’d be done.

I was working on a short paragraph, confirming I’d spelled Mumhain’s, Aedh, and Scáileanna correctly. Three bits of Irish scattered among four sentences. After checking each individually, I read them within the paragraph a few times, in case some random mistakes were lurking nearby, and then a final time, for good measure. All in all, since I’d started the retype, I’d read every word in that paragraph once as I typed it, again to check it, again in my whole-book proofread, and now four times more – and on that last pass over the last sentence, I finally caught the error that had been there all along.

His dead ears had not heard the bell, nor could sun’s light reach the shadow that ruled him from within.

See it? Good on ya. I had to read it seven times to notice “THE” is missing. “… nor could THE sun’s light reach the shadow that ruled him from within.” Harder for me to see it, of course. Because I wrote it.

Our brain’s ability to autocorrect has been the source of many a social media chuckle. You’ve all seen the memes, stuff like:

I BET YUO’RE R34D1NG 7H15 4U70M471C4LLY, NO PORB3LM.

The mood has struck me, so I’ll briefly digress to note that some people do not find that joke-sentence easy to decode. Conversely, for most dyslexics, reading is nothing but decoding. When they look at words on a page, the letters may shift, rearrange, or appear distorted and blurry.

It’s true that our brains process all the letters of a word simultaneously. Also true that swapping out a word’s letters for numbers barely stimulates the numeric centers of the brain, as long as the numbers have letter-like shapes. But it’s a myth that our brains can autocorrect any misspelled word as long its first and last letters are where they belong and all its letters are present. Give this one a try – without stopping to decipher it:

ftisnflurues

Another potent influence on the brain’s autonomic editor is context. Context preactivates areas of the brain that correspond to expectation. If we reach for a pan on the burner and feel a prickle of heat, we assume that if we keep reaching, things will get hotter. Aware of the situation and our expectation, our brains react as though we’ve already extended our arm and felt the burn, prompting us to pull back before we’re harmed.

Same thing when we’re reading. Our brains perceive the context of the information we’re taking in and jump to conclusions about the letters or words likely to follow.

The answer to the word-jumble above (ftisnflurues) is fruitfulness.

Context, great, makes sense – but immediate context can’t account for all the fill-in-the-blank edits our brains do without our knowledge or approval. Some cognitive neurologists believe we only think we’ve read a perfect passage perfectly because our brains automatically return to the flawed passage and fill in the gaps we left behind with info gleaned from succeeding passages. Brains autocorrect not only through context, but through subsequent context.

Presumably, context is to blame for me missing that “THE” in a sentence I’d read at least seven times. Seems the brain’s subconscious penchant for rearranging out-of-order letters and playing contextual mind-games can give us closure on polka-dot paragraphs studded with holes and littered with orthographic errors. But if I focus the same meticulous attention on my own writings as I do on the pieces I edit for others, why do word omissions, punctuation problems, and misspellings turn invisible on my pages and jump out at me from theirs?

According to an insightful 2016 study (click HERE for the Cliff Notes version), it all comes down to how the oh-so clever and convoluted brain operates when we’re reading.

Unless one has a hearing impairment, the first stages of reading development occur in the auditory region of the brain. We learn to read by sounding out words. At that point, we process written words at the speed of sound.

Once we know a word well, we don’t need to sound it out. The sounds RR-UH-NN morph into a familiar visual: the word run. Familiar words get transferred to the visual region of the brain; more specifically, to a “visual word form area” (VWFA). The VWFA contains a “visual-word dictionary.” A word stored in this dictionary is instantly identifiable — by sight. The more words in your visual-word dictionary, the faster you are able to read. People with word-heavy dictionaries in their VWFAs aren’t processing words at the speed of sound, but at the speed of light.

When proofing someone else’s work, we are reading words another person chose in contexts we are encountering for the first time on pages we’ve never seen before. While we’ve likely got most of the words stored in our VWFA’s, our unfamiliarity with the material works to our advantage. Our stubbornly helpful brains will make sure we miss a few errors (to be fair, they’re just trying to make reading easier and more worthwhile), but if we pay close attention to letter-order, grammar, and syntax, our proofing efforts should do us proud.

When proofreading our own work, we are looking at words consciously chosen and deliberately placed within contexts of our own creation on pages we’ve already re-read countless times – and every word on every page is already stored in our VWFAs. We can’t proofread our own material because our visual-dictionaries already tagged all the words. All the words. Unless we sound out each one – not read them aloud, mind, but make the appropriate noises a letter at a time – the proofreading parts of our brain essential to the task are “literally” incapable of catching our own errors.

Guess that’s why proofreaders get the big bucks.

(as if)