Helpful Writing Tip No. 4,591 to Help You Avoid
Looking Like A Moron: Read your work aloud and you might find the glaring
mistake others can see but you can’t because, ahem, it’s too simple of a
mistake for you to make.
Case in point: I fielded this question out at work
this week:
sentence is fragmented, "boxes may stored
on"
(Never mind the incompleteness of this comment, for
it is immaterial.)
What matters is that when I replied, a little
nonplussed, to the commenter via email, I still didn’t see the mistake. He
called me and when I heard him read the sentence over the phone I realized I
had a verb missing, viz:
“Boxes may be stored on . . . “
I hadn’t read the offending sentence out loud. I’d
read it a dozen times and couldn’t see the mistake. But when it was read aloud,
boy howdy did I hear it.
Our brains use different parts and sections when we
write versus when we speak, and there are times and seasons when one of those
parts will gloss over a mistake time and time again. It’ll be obvious we’ve
made a mistake, however, when we use other parts of our brain on the same task.
So read what you write, and you’ll be the better for it. Otherwise, you’re just
trapped in a tiger trap by a tiger. And not even Tom Tuttle of Tacoma can stand that kind of humiliation.
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