Blessing or a Curse? Depends on the purpose.

The coursework for my psychology degree involved learning how to administer and evaluate various testing instruments. I remember how pleased I was that I scored highly in the psychometric testing of reading skills. Seems my brain was masterful at supplying missing letters and punctuation from the passages I was reading, so that I hardly even noticed something was absent or incorrect. I thought it was amazing how our brains rearrange what our eyes report, to match what we are expecting to see, even though it isn’t there. Even more amazing, in my opinion, now that I’ve had time (lots of time) to pull this idea apart, is that this is a measure of intelligence. And the better you are at rearranging or fixing what you haven’t actually seen into something that isn’t really there, the higher you rate according to standardized intelligence testing tools and their interpretation.

To confound this delight, I still had trouble seeing the milk in the fridge, even though it was staring me in the face. Seems your brain can also hide things from you, and not only make them up.

Where am I going with this?

Proof reading. That’s where.

Have you ever tut-tutted about some poor harried journalist’s spelling or grammar? No? Only me then? Kidding. Sort of. We all like to feel we’re more accomplished than we are sometimes.

Back to my point. Which is… that I wouldn’t have been so chuffed about this brain trickery if I’d ever imagined I’d have to read my own novel hundreds of times. At least it seems like it. 

To proof read you have to tell your brain to notice all the incorrectly placed apostrophe’s (just like this one), mispelt words (and another), and and repeated words, Capitals and  spaces and even full stops, where they shouldn’t be.. The list isn’t exhaustive, as much as exhausting. You want your brain to notice these things, which it originally did without your consent or awareness, that is automatically, and not correct them without your consent or awareness, that is, automatically. You want your brain to unautomate the process AND to tell you when it notices, so that you, personally, can do the fixing up. 

Trouble is, you were never involved in the process in the first place. Your brain pretty much did this by itself. If your brain is like mine, you probably and quite unconsciously, said something like I’m sure you meant to say hi instead of high their, I mean there, and kept reading. The trick in proofreading is to stay focused which is all well and good for the odd sentence, but difficult to sustain or maintain over 300 pages or more, especially when your, I mean you’re involved in the story. 

So I now no longer have that smug feeling. In fact, I’m a bit worried that readers are going to notice how good my brain is at not seeing mistakes. So when you’re reading, PLEASE feel free to send me a quick message at fabian.foley30@gmail.com if you spot something my overworked brain missed. 

And if you do miss the errors, yay for you, because you apparently have superior reading intelligence too.

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Robert is eleven when his best friend dies and he learns that if he wants to survive in the world he has to be ‘normal’. He buries his feelings, his awful childhood memories, and his suspicion that he is gay.