When I was in school, my English teachers always encouraged us to read our papers backwards in order to help catch spelling and grammar mistakes. When I was a proofreader, and later an editor, the leads always wanted me to read documents backwards as the last step before I gave it back to them.
When I briefly dabbled in web design, I quickly discovered that reading backwards also helps catch tags that aren’t closed.
A couple of weekends ago, I got it into my head to watch Serenity and then Firefly right behind, except I watched the episodes in reverse order. Watching the entire series backwards helped me see things I hadn’t noticed before.
It made me think. I’ve been wrestling with flow issues in my fiction, and I wondered if reading backwards might solve at least part of the problem. So, I sat down with the storyboard for my current project, and I read the scenes in reverse order. Sure enough, I found a few spots where I hadn’t fully thought out the plot or a character, and I was able to address those problems right there. Doing that work means that I should end up happier with this manuscript when it’s finished, and it means fewer scenes that I’ll have to add in during the editing stage.
Reading your work backwards, be it a story, a process document, or code, causes you to look at your work in a different way, and it helps you see errors that you might have missed because your mind tells you that what you meant to write is already there. You’ll find misspelled words, missed punctuation, and dropped words. It’s an additional step that can help make your work look that much more polished.
It’s amazing how much of my time is spent writing, editing, or teaching writing these days. (Now if I could just earn a little money from it…)
It’s equally amazing how many of my clients and students are completely surprised at how many silly mistakes I catch when I’m editing.
If you intend to share what you’ve written, it is imperative that you proofread it. Check for flow, punctuation, spelling. Does it make sense? Does it read well? If you aren’t sure, have someone else read it! An extra pair of eyes can show you things in your writing that you may not have noticed before, both good and bad.
Remember, when you publish something, it’s out there. Sure, you can edit it, but it’ll save you time and face if you’re careful in your pre-publishing checks!
If you write or type anything that is going to be shared with an audience, you must remember to read over it (or have a trusted acquaintance read over it for you). This goes not only for content, but code as well. The content bit makes sense. Pointless typos can just make you look silly, or even worse, careless. Not proofreading your code can have the same effect.
I studied computer programming for a couple of years right around the end of high school, beginning of college, and most of my teachers and professors wouldn’t allow us to even start typing our code until we had read over our code and corrected any glaringly obvious errors. For a long time after I started working with HTML, I forced myself back into this habit of reading over everything before posting it because I was notorious for either mistyping closing tags, or just forgetting them all together.
The results were usually somewhere between humorous and disastrous.
Back in April, I shared my sneaky trick for proofreading part of my code, but it does require a bit of diligence and willingness to take that extra time and go that extra mile to make sure your code won’t create more problems than it’s supposed to be solving.
If you are typing, always, always, always go back and read it over. Read it backwards if you have to, but read for errors!
