Side profile of a man with a flat cap, smiling and looking into the distance. He is wearing a burgundy scarf and an olive-green coat with a fluffy hood.

“I can’t read a text without finding typos, spelling mistakes, word duplications and punctuation errors. Because of this, and following my wife’s encouragement, I decided to train with the College of Media and Publishing as a proofreader. The course taught me so much and reaffirmed what we had suspected all along—my brain automatically picks out errors in written text.

“This is only one piece of the puzzle though and a good proofreader keeps a number of essential tools at his or her disposal, to enable top level proofreading. This includes dictionaries, grammar books and other reference works.”

Normally, when an error occurs in a text, our brain overrides and corrects what it has seen, fooling us into thinking we’ve not even seen the error in the first place.

For example, the word ‘defer’ can easily become ‘differ’ in our mind. ‘Your’ can become ‘you’re’ or vice-a-versa. Each word is spelt correctly but could be used in the wrong context—making the reading of the text clumsy.

Here is an example of how brilliant our brain is and how it auto-corrects what it sees: I wsa wlaking dwon teh raod one dya wehn a mna siad to me: “Waht aer yuo donig hree?”

Did you get it?—I was walking down the road one day when a man said to me: “What are you doing here?”