Before you hit Send. . .

Why it's so devilishly hard to edit yourself.

ONE OF the Ross Rules is BE COLLABORATIVE. In my experience, good writers don’t just welcome criticism, they seek it out. Some well-known writers produce fantastically clean manuscripts. Others produce unpolished drafts full of muddled thinking and grammatical errors. All of them need an editor. Only the stubborn and insecure view well-meant feedback as an attack on their intelligence or their egos.

It’s remarkable how many errors, clumsy sentences, and incoherent paragraphs find their way into pixels and print these days. As copy editors become a vanishing breed, even once-reputable brands publish stuff full of mistakes and ambiguities. Much of this sloppiness could have been avoided if only the writer had said to a friend or colleague, “Could you have a quick look at this proposal before I send it?”

It’s not easy to edit your own work. Reviewing what you’ve written, you know what’s coming. You’ve seen the movie. In the course of writing and rewriting, you’ve read a phrase like “Russian President Vladmir Putin” so often that you pass right over it without noticing that there’s an “i” missing from “Vladmir.” That’s because we make sense of words not via letter-by-letter scrutiny. Rather, we deduce words from their first and last letters, which explains why we can mkae snsee of scarmbeld wrdos so lnog as tohse two ltetres are in pclae.

Reading is an intricate process that requires many brain functions to mesh. Small wonder that a variation of Murphy’s Law applies to written communication (if something can be misinterpreted, it will be), that illiteracy is surprisingly widespread, and that reading disorders such as dyslexia and alexia are not uncommon.

I’m alert to most spelling and grammatical errors, with one glaring exception: a word that that appears twice in succession. For some reason I find it hard to spot the the superfluous word until it’s drawn to my attention. A magazine editor I once worked with used a ruler to stay focused on one line, and one word, at a time. As a final run-through, she’d read the entire article backwards, a discipline that’s laborious but effective at revealing a misspelling or repetition one may may have missed. (Did you catch all three repetitions?)

A WRITER I KNEW in Toronto, the late Howard Engel, suffered a stroke that left him with a rare condition—alexia sine agraphia. Howard woke up one morning and couldn’t make sense of the newspaper. Oddly, he could still write, but he could no longer read. Oliver Sacks wrote about this strange case in the New Yorker.

A bit of science to explain reading comprehension. As you read, your visual cortex is analyzing input from your retinas: the shapes and patterns of the letters I’ve arranged into words and sentences. Your brain is identifying these words by matching their visual patterns with your stored knowledge of word shapes and structures. That process happens in your left occipitotemporal cortex.

Once you recognize a word, another part of your brain supplies the phonological component. A region in the left hemisphere reminds you what the word sounds like when you speak it. This step is obviously crucial for reading aloud.

Once you’ve recognized a word and triggered its phonological representation, the left temporal and frontal regions help you process the word semantically. These areas let you understand the meaning of words and their connections to other words and concepts.

As well as individual word meanings, your brain is processing the structure and syntax of aggregations of words: phrases and sentences. Here your left posterior superior temporal gyrus and left inferior frontal gyrus come into play. These regions let you analyze the relationships between individual words, and so help you grasp overall sentence structure.

READING ALSO REQUIRES working memory, which resides in the prefrontal cortex. Working memory is a bit like RAM (random access memory) in a computer, the short-term memory storage on which the computer’s CPU (central processing unit) depends. Your own working memory is temporarily holding and sorting what you’ve just read as you read this paragraph.

Mechanisms in the parietal cortex and the frontal eye fields help direct your attention to specific parts of this little essay. You may want to go back and re-read something in a previous paragraph, for example, without forgetting where to return (right here!) to pick up the thread.

Finally, you’re integrating word meanings, syntax, and semantics to arrive at a broad, coherent understanding of what I’ve written. This higher-order process enlists various brain regions—including your prefrontal cortex, parietal cortex, and temporal lobes—to provide an overarching sense of this post.

All this happens almost instantaneously. That’s a lot of separate brain processes that can go wrong. Opportunities for misunderstanding abound. You may misread a word. You may recall, erroneously, that Howard Engel could still read after his stroke, but could no longer write. You may never have actually heard a word on the page, and so have no good phonological representation stored away. (I knew the meaning of “eschew,” and used it in writing, long before I heard someone say it aloud. I thought they’d said “a shoe.”)

What seems clear to the writer may confuse a reader. The other day a neighbour texted to ask if I had an extension cord. I replied: “I do. Length needed?” My meaning seemed clear to me, but it wasn’t to him. He texted back: “Yeah, it’s gotta reach from the garage to my car.” I texted what I should have said in the first place: “What length of cord do you need?”

Two people can get the same email and have opposite interpretations of (for example) what the boss is suggesting. The boss thinks he’s being clear; both readers think they understand what he’s saying; yet one of them assumes they’re being prompted to act, while the other thinks the boss has implied that he’ll take action himself.  

AFTER DOING a Ross Rules workshop in Vancouver, I was approached by the receptionist. The company president was a poor writer, she said, but no one ever mentioned it. He misused “affect” and “effect,” capitalized words randomly, and added an occasional apostrophe to plurals. She herself had excellent knowledge of grammar and syntax, but didn’t feel she had the authority to speak to him. I’d stressed the value of collaboration in the session, and I followed up with the president by email to thank him for the gig. I mentioned that Eve (as I’ll call her) was a natural editor and could be a great resource for others in the office. The boss took the hint and started asking her to review what he’d written.

The title of this post is a good question to ask any time you’re about to publish anything of consequence. By definition, it’s impossible to be even half-way objective about your own writing (unless you’ve at least set it aside for a long while, then come back to it). That’s why a second set of eyes is a precious asset. Once you’ve run out of ways of improving what you’ve written, it pays to have someone else give it a try.

(If you enjoyed this little essay, please share it with a friend or colleague.)