3 Mistakes Everyone Makes When Their Work is Critiqued

I am not a perfect writer, but I have an eye for editing (other people’s work…) and have edited countless essays, short stories, and cover letters. As a tutor I have helped students with everything from basic sentence structure to proper citations to how many syllables are in a haiku.  As you can imagine, I come up against the same mistakes again and again but the most common errors have nothing to do with grammar, syntax, or formatting.

Bellow are three of the most common blunders writers make:

1. Waiting to Edit Until the Last Minute

We’ve all been there, it’s the day before a big essay is due and you’re swiggin’ Red Bulls like it’s your job while frantically trying to produce something that resembles a decent paper. (Let’s not kid ourselves, this doesn’t just happen in college). By the time dawn rolls around your paper is finally at the proper length but there is only enough time left before class to give a quick read through before you sprint to the library to print that sucker out. I can guarantee that no matter how talented a writer you are, you just turned in a paper with glaringly obvious mistakes.

No doubt you’ve come across this meme or some variation of it:

No idea what that thing in the middle is supposed to be…

While it’s not true that a researcher at Cambridge University discovered that the human brain can recognize words no matter the order of the letters as long as the first and last are the same, there is some truth to the phenomenon. There are tricks that your brain plays on you when you’re reading that makes typos incredibly easy to miss, in part because when reading we rely on our intuition and not just our reading skills. Our brains intuitively fill in the blanks and look for the overall meaning rather than each word. Ester Inglis-Arkell covers this in her blog on “An Illusion that Explains Why Typos Are So Hard to Catch.”

2. Not Rejecting Edits You Disagree With