According to Gestalt psychology, our brains “correct” mistakes as we read. That’s why, for example, you can read some text over and over again and not realise that a particular word has been repeated, or left out.

For this and similar reasons, it’s essential to have your work proofread for textual errors by someone else. Preferably someone who is unfamiliar with the subject, because they are less likely to mentally correct the same errors as you would. This is a case where someone else’s ignorance is useful!

If you don’t have someone who can proofread it, then copy and paste it into a text-to-speech application. That has two advantages:

Firstly, the text-to-speech program won’t make automatic corrections.

Secondly, you will be able to hear mistakes straight away.

I discovered a pretty good, and free, text-to-speech engine on the web:

Natural readers

I thought I’d write this article today because on 2 September in 2014 I wrote one entitled Why you need a proofreader, which you may enjoy reading.