Tuesday, March 01, 2005

Proofreading

I know I've been rather lax in updating. But, hey. it's midterms week! Gimme a break (all two of you who read this!)..

Anyway, I noticed an interesting phenomenon today. It might not be all that revolutionary to you, but it was to me.

Proofreading, to me, has always been a rather perfunctory check for your basic grammatical and stylistic errors. After writing a paper, I would read it over on the screen and I might send it to someone else to check over it, someone with fresh eyes.

Today I knew that I had time between classes, so I decided to print out a paper and bring it with me to do some proofreading. Wow. Just looking at the paper in print caused me to see so many things I hadn't noticed on the screen before. When I got through making changes with my red pen, my 12 page paper looked positively bloody.

I don't know what the actual difference is, or why it's the case that (at least for me) you catch more things on paper than on screen, but, dude, I am so going to start doing this!

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