← A Grown-Up's Writing Desk · Lesson 4 of 4
The copyeditor's table
Your eye reads what you meant, not what you wrote. Reading aloud slows you down enough to hear a missing word, a repeated one, or a sentence that runs out of breath.
Edit in passes, one thing at a time: first the missing words, then the repeats, then the spelling. One pass for one thing catches more than one pass for everything.
Print it if you can. A page on a table looks different from a screen, and the change helps you see it fresh.
You keep missing the same typo on screen. What helps most?
A lesson is kept once you've answered the question and written at least 8 words. Nobody grades it; it stays on this device.