What It's Like Proofreading as a Dyslexic
Typos have, and always will be, the bane of my existence. No matter how careful I am, no matter how many times I think I've managed to avoid screwing up, sooner or later, when I read back through something, I find another one. They're weeds in my garden of well-manicured prose.
I bring this up because I recently had to go through the proofs of my story "Slow Recovery," which will appear in Star Crossed on April 26th.
Proofreading my work has always been difficult for me because of my dyslexia. Because of how my brain receives visual information, I don't always notice when I've made an error.
Sometimes, the mistake is as simple as misplacing letters. All the right letters are there for the word, but they're not necessarily in the right order.
Other times, I'll have what I call "brain hiccups." I'll start writing one sentence, then suddenly, I'll shift the sentence in my mind slightly and keep typing. So, in the end, the first half will be from the first version of the sentence and the second half will be from the edit; put the two together, and they don't make sense.
Then there are times when I say a sentence in my head as I write it, but then when I come to type it, I end up missing a word. Usually, it's a short word like "a" or "the". These are especially annoying because when I read back, my brain will read the sentence with the word in it, even if the word isn't on the page.
My favorite mini-fuck-ups though are the "almost correct mistypes." This is where (and I can tell this is what must've been going through my head in these instances), I'll type a word that is very close to what I intended, but there's something that's just slight wrong. For instance--this is a recent example--in one sentence I wrote, I meant to use the word "had." But instead of typing "had," I typed "hand." The second I saw that mistake, I rolled my eyes and thought, "Really?"
To this day, I find it hard to talk about this aspect of my life. When you've felt shame over anything, even something like a "learning disorder," over which you had no control, airing that part of yourself in public hurts. Still, it's a part of who I am, and I have to deal with it--now and always.
I reviewed my proofs of "Slow Recovery," as best as I could. Hopefully, I caught all of the errors so I don't embarrass myself or my colleagues. There's nothing more unprofessional than finding a typo in a piece of published work. Of course, I'm not perfect. I do my best with what I have, and I try my best to overcome and compensate for my shortfalls.
(Star Crossed is now available for pre-order on Amazon.)
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