The Science Is In: Why We Can’t Spot Our Own Typos!

When I completed the 4th draft of my fable “The Religion of Birds”, I decided to conduct an experiment – and attempt to copyedit the book myself.

Keep in mind that I pay scant attention to housekeeping issues during initial drafts – I’m simply sculpting out the book, getting the words on the page, and loosely attempting to follow a narrative arc with plot points and to a pre-determined structure. Housekeeping comes later.

So I made a first pass and logged the errors – 84 in total (it’s not a long book) – a combination of typos, grammar slips, punctuation problems and various assorted issues.

I then put the manuscript aside for a month, and revisited – confident that I’d find a mere handful of faux-pas. Imagine my surprise when on the second pass I logged 128 errors (on top of the 84 that I’d corrected)!

This, I surmised, is why we shouldn’t attempt to edit our own work!

Fortunately, science backs this up. It turns out there’s a reason why it’s so hard to catch your own typos.

I’m sure this will resonate. You’ve perfected your paper, article, or email and made sure every word fits and makes sense, your argument sings, and you are ready to stun everyone with your expertise. A quick proofread and you eagerly hit send or submit.

The next day, instead of the anticipated applause and respectful adulation about your piece of writing, all you see are the glaring misspellings and typos that people, often gleefully, have pointed out. You’re a professional editor, a literature graduate, and an author in your own right, but still, you spelled people and first wrong (I mean poeple and frist, come on!).

The temptation is to think you’re stupid and unprofessional and you wish you could climb into a hole and just die.

Well, don’t! This happens to just about everyone.

You’ll be pleased to know the reason those typos have gone under your radar is not because you’re stupid, but because you’re smart. I am not saying this to make you feel good about your typos, but because there is interesting science behind why we usually don’t catch our own typos when we proofread our own work.

It’s important to know that you are showing intelligence when you miss your own typos. If you don’t believe me, then listen to psychologist Tom Stafford, who studies typos at the University of Sheffield. Tom says that “when you’re writing, you’re trying to convey meaning. It’s a very high-level task.”

Building meaning is a demanding task that requires a lot of attention. The brain drifts your attention from simple and general tasks such as combining letters to form words, to the higher and complex task of combining and arranging sentences to form complex ideas, a process that is known as “generalization.

“We don’t catch every detail because we’re not like computers or NSA databases,” says Stafford. “Rather, we take in sensory information and combine it with what we expect, and we extract meaning.”

So how is it that we so easily spot other people’s typos? When we’re reading other peoples’ works, we arrive at meaning faster by using less brainpower. That is, we have brainpower left over to focus on other trivial tasks such as paying attention to how words are spelled, or how sentences look. This doesn’t happen when we proofread our own texts because what we see on the screen is competing with the version that already exists in our heads. This consumes brainpower leaving nothing left to focus on the “trivial” task of editing.

It’s like driving in town. When you are on a busy road you get blinkered to the details around you and focus entirely on your destination. You become blind to details because your brain is operating on instinct.

By the time you proofread your own work, your brain already knows the destination. But when others are proofreading your work, they are yet to discover the destination. Because their brains are on this journey for the first time, they are paying more attention to the details along the way and not anticipating the journey’s end.

Geoff Poundes is a professional developmental editor, specialising in non-fiction and in particular business, sport and history, biography and memoir. Go to www.geoffpoundeseditor.co.uk to find out more.