Three tricks to sharpen your proofreading eye

photo by Alvimann, morguefile.comI edit for a living, and yet when it comes to cleaning up my own work, I often blithely pass over simple errors.  Why is that?

Brain science says our minds are sense-making machines. Our minds will interpret what's in front of us as what we expect to see, mentally filling in omitted words, for example, or seeing expected end punctuation that isn't actually there.

So how does one trick the mind to stop making sense (and assumptions)? Here are a few tricks I...