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Comment by aaroninsf | Hacker News Reader

Pro tip, from an actual pro: you can't copyedit your own copy.

Lots of reasons why, including, your inability to recognize problems you are unaware of; the inexorable fact of reading what you think you wrote, not what is on the page; inability to see logical problems, missing assumptions, etc. Ad infinitum.

There are line-level hacks which can help with some of this, e.g. reading backwards to find typographic and spelling error...

...but there is no general solution.

Suggested fix: find a professional peer and become their formal editing buddy. Define terms and scope, this is not peer review–it is simply copy editing.

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I agree but have found that I'm better at copyediting my own copy the further I am from it. If I wrote something in the last week I might as well be a spellchecker. If I wrote something last month I will catch more things but not as much as if it were someone else's writing. A year or more and I start to ask "Who on earth wrote this like this?!" :) .

> reading backwards to find typographic and spelling error...

Ha, nice, I will try this out.

> find a professional peer and become their formal editing buddy

Yeah, teams should have a review system for documentation, like they certainly have one for code review.

In practice, with many non-native English speakers in the team (100% in my case), this is something of an issue. But we do what we can :)

What tends to help me with long-standing documents in particular is to reread them after some time passes. A couple months down the line, I have lost much of the context, which makes it easier to spot problematic bits. I am also not invested in the text as much, which makes it easier to rip out the parts that have not aged well.

I agree so much with this. You need "cold eyes". One important function of copy editing is to check your assumptions, and make sure everything is explained that needs explaining. That's almost impossible to perform on one's own writing and thought, because everything you know seems obvious, and everything you assume has become the natural and invisible given. Note how many people Paul Graham cites as reading his essays. Lots. Smart people. That's one reason why the essays are so good. It takes a village, or at least a smart friend, to write something good. It doesn't float out of your brain as a perfect work of art.

One copy-editing trick I employ is to use a text-to-speech system to read my work back to me. If I merely read it myself, my brain will autocorrect my mistakes into what I meant to write. When the computer reads my work, it pulls no punches.

Interesting. What software do you recommend? Do you know of something that can take a latex or pdf document?

I actually use the backwards hack for code review too.

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