(AKA How to proofread your writing without screwing up.)
Good writing is good for business. It shows you’re a pro. It shows you’ve got a brain in your head and are therefore (somewhat) trustworthy. You’re a good investment.
And your brain tries really hard to help you out with all that. But when your brain tries to be smart it can be bad news for your blog.
How?
Typos.
We all know and hate them. Blame your brain.
Your brain skips letters and words so you can read faster. It also frees the brain up for the more challenging work of processing what you’re reading. It’s efficient. But it makes it really hard to catch misspelled, missed or duplicated words.
Worse still, the more familiar you are with what you’re reading (like, say, a blog post you’ve been working on for more hours than you care to admit), the more your brain will skip.
You might’ve seen this bad boy circling Facebook:
I cdn'uolt blveiee taht I cluod aulaclty uesdnatnrd what I was
rdanieg: the phaonmneel pweor of the hmuan mind. Aoccdrnig to a
rseearch taem at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn't mttaer in waht
oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoatnt tihng is taht
the frist and lsat ltteer be in the rghit pclae. The rset can be a
taotl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit a problem. Tihs is
bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but
the wrod as a whole. Scuh a cdonition is arpppoiatrely cllaed
typoglycemia.
Now, apparently there is no such research team at Cambridge University, and typoglycemia is a fad word—not scientifically approved. (Click here for an interesting analysis by a real Cambridge Uni researcher - scroll half way down for the juicy stuff.) But you get the point.
So you defeat your smartness. In the next post, we'll talk about how to do that. Stay tuned!