Sometimes I read this as “proo-freading” or “Professor Eading”, sometimes I look at a word for so long that it ceases to be real anymore. I’ll read the same text over and over again trying to find errors and eventually I simply begin to ignore the obvious mistakes. Faced with a wall of text, no matter how riveting the story, no matter the importance, I begin to find my eyes skipping sentences, darting around the page looking for the end. It occurs to me that this problem is entirely unique to myself, but judging by the vast amount of literature detailing this exact problem and how to fix it… it probably isn’t.
SEMANTIC SATIATION
Once in junior high, I was waiting to go on stage for some rehearsal – I forget for what. The only thing I remember was that I was in a distinctly itchy version of formal wear, with not much to do. This was before I had a smart phone, which were common, but not yet ubiquitous – so there was nothing to satiate my boredom, but the pencil I had in my pocket and some bits of tissue paper. being a teenager, the funniest thing that I could think of was the word “taco”. for the next thirty minutes, I wrote the word taco, over and over, until the piece of paper was covered – with bits of the word stuffed in between lines, and eventually spilled onto the desk. I don’t know why or how it began, but eventually, I covered a section of the desk too. (Don’t worry – the desk was hardened acrylic, I could wipe it off.)
Somewhere along the line, the word taco ceased to mean “taco” and started to become a jumble of letters, -c-o-t-a-c-, repeating endlessly on paper. Eventually, the letters themselves stopped being letters and more like a repetition of sounds and symbols; that ‘c’ simply became another curve, flowing into another.
DUCKING THE ISSUE
Interestingly enough, there is another solution that comes from the software engineering mythos – explain your problems to a rubber duck and you will find a solution. Doesn’t it seem strange? I suppose when you try to explain it to someone smarter than you – you assume that they already have answers and that you are missing something. Explaining to a duck means that you have to organize your own thoughts before having it all spill out of your head.
Maybe it seems crazy to an outsider – but I suppose Wilson the Volleyball would have been an excellent help in modern problem solving.
E-READERS AND SCREENS
When it is all a bit too much to read on a screen, I just print it out. Sometimes the shift from the digital to the physical helps me take a step back and review the things I have written with a more critical eye. The same thing happens with books; the physical pages gives stories something and I take a just a little bit longer to read them.