Why You Should Never Proofread Your Own Writing

It’s a fact. You should never proofread something that you wrote yourself. Not even if you are a professional proofreader. Not even if your name is Merriam, or Webster, or if you are on the staff of the Chicago Manual of Style itself, or if you’ve taught English for 99 years.

I don’t know why this is true. But it is. You will never catch all the mistakes in your own writing. You will miss obvious flaws that you might have seen easily if reading somebody else’s work.

I’d love a psychologist’s opinion on this. What makes people who can spot typos from outer space—in other people’s work—partially blind to their own typos?

Here are my theories as to why this happens:

1. If you wrote it yourself, you are “too close” to the text. What does that mean? Your brain has gone through the creative process of transforming your ideas into written words. As a result, your own writing, from your brain’s perspective, becomes something other than just any old piece of text like you might read in a book. Instead, it’s an extension of your mind. It’s your ideas, converted into ink or pixels. This may seem like the same thing as any other text, but to your brain, it’s not.
   
   When you’ve written down your own ideas, you don’t have the luxury of distance—the ideas are part of you. You can’t be objective. This is why spotting problems with text structure, idea flow, wordiness, and length is challenging when trying to edit your own writing. But it can also blind you to typos, because you’re not looking at your own words as a proofreader would, or even as a reader would. When you read your own words, you’re recalling the mental processes that produced those words (your choice of specific phrases, etc.), and the ideas themselves are being re-triggered in your mind. Those higher mental processes are somewhat incompatible with the technical concentration required to produce perfect grammar and syntax.
   
   
2. You tend to skim instead of read. A writer generally goes through several steps: writing, rewriting, and more rewriting. By the time you have a final draft, you’ve looked at your text several times, sometimes dozens of times. When you've read something that many times, your brain tends to skim over it, already knowing the gist of what is being said. By contrast, good proofreading requires reading text thoroughly and carefully, sometimes pronouncing each word in your head as if it were being spoken aloud to you.

Bottom line: If you want your writing to be error free, have someone else proofread it. Preferably a born proofreader. A fresh set of eyes is key.

If you don’t have someone else to proofread your work, at least try to set it aside for a few days and then go back to it. Time diminishes the two effects that I described above. Your eyes will be (if not totally objective) more fresh, the more time you place between the writing and the proofreading.