Science says you can't review your own work
Editing is about more than just typos and missed punctuation. While that’s important, thorough editing will also look at your thesis, supporting content, structure, clarity, and diction.
But it’s really hard for us to review any of these areas for our own work. And the reason why isn’t because our brains our dumb… It’s also because our brains are really smart.
Writing is a very high-level task, and when the brain engages in a high-level task, it uses a lot of generalization and shorthand on lower-level tasks in order to redirect that effort to the more difficult task. When you are trying to convey a complex message, you are thinking about the message as a whole, but you are not really thinking about how to spell “whole.”
This is similar to the trick your brain uses to read. Did you konw taht as lnog as the frsit and lsat ltetres of a wrod are crorect, yuor barin can fgurie it out to “raed” it? That’s because we aren’t analyzing each letter; we are reading the word as a whole. If we always had to take in every detail, we wouldn’t have the time or the mental capacity to do more complex tasks, like writing.
So when you proofread or edit your own work, you’re doing a great deal of generalizing and shorthand. You are caught up in what you are meaning to say, so you can’t easily focus on what you are actually saying. As Wired explains it: “By the time you proof read your own work, your brain already knows the destination,” but “your readers are more likely to pick up on your errors… because their brains are on this journey for the first time, so they are paying more attention to the details along the way and not anticipating the final destination.”
So do yourself a favor, and ask someone else to take a look at your writing. They are more likely to catch any issues — big or small.
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