Proofreading glaring errors is more difficult than it may appear?
Thursday, March 18th, 2010 at
4:37 am
Why do otherwise sensible people make glaring writing errors that they only see 30 minutes before handing in their report? Asked otherwise, why does proofreading remain challenging?
Adaptibility is an issue, yes – are there well documented studies of how this works? For the example given in one of the answers, the mind might skip over one (intentional) error made by the answerer. Yet, there became a threshhold were we saw there are too many errors and then they all became visible.
Are some people more prone to this than others?
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The glaring errors are usually due to inattention from familiarity: the author has been working with the text so long, she perceives what she intended to write, rather than what she actually wrote.
The human brain has amazing adaptive capabilities, and we otfen can fgirue out waht teh ohetr pesron was trnyig to say, eevn wehn their are mlutipel erorrs in hte mian txt. Sometimes, this results in our minds filling in things that aren’t actually there, but are strongly implied by the context.