You have a highly informative website! Now, about:
The best technique for proofreading is to read each sentence backward.
Did you really mean what that sounds like? Taking one sentence at a time, I should reverse all the words of the sentence front to back and read the words of the sentence in reverse sequence? Or maybe you meant something like the following: The best technique for proofreading is to advance backward through the text you are editing, one full sentence at a time, starting with the last sentence of the text, and ending with the first sentence of that text. Also, if you would explain the rationale for using this technique, it might be clearer what you have in mind. Thanks!—Todd Shandelman, Houston, Texas
Thank you, Todd!
Yes, you read that right: read each sentence backward.
Backward sentence each read: right that read you, yes.
The biggest pitfall of proofreading is our brain’s tendency to assume that the words it expects are already there. We’re not robots, diligently accepted only the data with which we are presented. We interact constantly with our environment, accepting data, embellishing it, interpreting it, making lightning connections between it and the data we already have—understanding it.
So, for instance, if you’re moving lickety-split at top speed and there’s a starving predator lunging twenty feet behind you and you don’t see the hole you’re about to step into, the ability to remember that hole (“I stepped in it last time!”) and supply it to your eye can save your life.
You will then live to breed, and with any luck at all your offspring will inherit the same ability to remember and supply to the eye data that’s not necessarily visible in the moment.
Fast-forward a million years.
You’re reading a page that you’ve read a dozen times before, moving lickety-split at top speed thinking about a hundred other issues with this novel, and you don’t see a missing or misspelled word. It’s okay! You have the ability to remember that word (“I know what I meant”) and supply it to your eye.
All is well, and you will live to breed.
However, if you reading each sentence backward—backward sentence each reading you (hey! typo!) if—you are suddenly reading something you haven’t read before. And so missing and mispelled words become more visible: if you’re reading each sentence backward.
This is why proofreaders are necessary and why most top editors are not proofreaders. We’re thinking about those hundred other issues with this novel, and it would cost you a fortune to hire us to read every one of your sentences backward.
This is also why Truman Capote famously put his stories in a drawer to let them go cold for a year before re-reading them.
That works too.