Yesterday I realised that I had made quite a big typo in the writer’s group blog that I run. Not only did I make the mistake in the written part, I made the same mistake in the link.

It got me thinking how easy it is to make mistakes and miss them in the proofreading. How often do we find mistakes in published books?

The problem with reading through it, is that we might not spot a mistakes if the middle letters are mixed up but the first and last and number of letters are all the same. There’s a test that goes around to see if you can read a paragraph if all the middle letters are mixed up. And you can, if maybe a bit slower.

I seem to have a vague recollection of something like this mentioned in my third year of psych.

And nowadays, we have the added complication of autocorrect. Even when we put the right word in, the computer or other device changes it to something completely different.

So what am I getting at?

We all make mistakes, even top authors and their proof-readers.