Never Miss Another Typo When Proofreading
One tip to finding typos when proofreading your work is to read your writing aloud — this helps, but you may still not catch many of your mistakes. You tend to read what you think you wrote, rather than what you actually did.
You need someone else to read your writing aloud. But, if you are a person who produces a lot of words, say for a blog, you’ll probably run out of willing friends before you run out of material to proofread.
Fortunately, your computer can help. If you use Mac OS X, it can read your writing for you.
If you use OS X 10.5 (Leopard) or earlier, select the text you want spoken, then go to the program name in the menu bar, select services, then ‘start speaking text’.
In OS X 10.6 (Snow Leopard) you can often just select the text and right click to bring up the speech option. (This doesn’t work in some applications, so just do a quick copy/paste to dump the text into Stickies).
As your computer speaks the text, read along. Now you’ll get to hear what you really wrote, rather than what you think you wrote.
(P.S. For the record, when I used this trick on this post, I found two errors: ‘goto’ not ‘go to’ and ‘head’ not ‘hear’)
--
Header photograph by Marcin Wichary
--To read the rest of the 30 Days to a More Organized Life series, click to get free updates via email or RSS.
--
If you would like personalized help in being more productive and managing your time then click here to read about time management coaching from Silver Clipboard. The first session is free, so why not give it a try?
If you happen to be forced to use Windoze, there is an Australian product that does extremely well at reading text:
Text2Go.
Thanks for the tip, Michael, but it looks like Text2Go is a pay application. Do you know of any free equivalent for windows?
Thanks for the tip Mike!
I already do this. It was very helpful when I needed to write lots of essays in post-secondary.
Now, I’m reading aloud the short stories my dad wrote, so it’s working out pretty well.
If you want to read (or listen to) his stories, check out http://www.bevanbird.com/road_south/
Peace,
Bevan