Editing My Writing

I went back through the ECC blog the other day, looking for a post that I wanted to reference to someone. Of course I reread it to be sure it said what I remembered. Yeah… it did… but I also found two grammatical errors. Ugh! That’s SO frustrating! When I post one of these, I generally read it a couple of times and if possible, read it out loud to myself before I post it. Unfortunately, both errors appear to be the result of previous editing where I apparently changed part of a sentence, but not the rest.

I struggle proofreading my own work. I know what I wanted to say and often gloss over my mistakes, apparently self-correcting them in my head. This is just the opposite of what I do reading other people’s writing. When reading someone else’s article, blog, etc., once I run across an error, I reset to proofreading mode and find myself looking for additional errors in lieu of absorbing content.

That said, let me throw this out there to my lurkers. While I don’t like it when I or others find errors in my writing, please don’t hesitate to tell me about them. Yes, I will be embarrassed, because I try my best to avoid them, but better that I’m told and correct them than let them continue to stand for others to stumble over. This blog celebrated its 12th Birthday in May. There are 178 pages of posts! No Kim & Ginny, I’m not going back and removing all the double spaces after periods! Ha! I’ve corrected that from when I learned I was in error, but those are going to stay in the older posts.

I’ve also chosen to write like I talk, so proper English often loses out to colloquialisms. While it is technically Easterday Construction Co., Inc.’s business blog, I often use it as a personal forum to vent about things that aren’t worth arguing in public. Some examples of that are here, here and here if you’re interested. Judging by the limited comments, I’m probably talking to myself most of the time here… which may be for the best! If you made it this far, thanks for “listening”.

Graphic in the top paragraph was borrowed from The Princeton Tutoring Blog