Why is it so hard to spot mistakes in your own writing?

In this episode, I’m talking about the science behind proofreading: why your brain “autocorrects” spelling mistakes, why you often read what you meant to write instead of what is actually on the page, and why simply reading your essay again is not enough.

I’ll also share practical proofreading strategies you can use in the Cambridge exam, including how to slow your brain down, what to check first, and how to catch the silly mistakes that make your writing look weaker than it really is.

 If this episode helped you, make sure you subscribe or follow the podcast so you don’t miss next week’s training, and if you need help with your English, send me a message on Instagram and let's chat. 

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Transcript

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Good morning, everybody, and welcome to the Cambridge Advanced Accelerator podcast. My name is Cheryl, and I'm here to help you with all things related to the Cambridge Advanced exam and, of course, getting your level up to C1 or even C2 in English. Now, this is our last podcast for a couple of weeks as we go into the summer break. I am jetting off to Scotland on Friday. I say summer break. I'm taking all my uh waterproof jackets, waterproof trousers, jumpers, jeans, I'm taking all my winter gear with me for my summer. I'm doing air quotes here for my summer holiday. But anyway, once I'm back in a couple of weeks, I will tell you all about it. But today we're going to a completely different topic. And this is something that I was asked uh a couple of times last week uh by my students, uh and it was about writing and making silly mistakes in your writing. That when you go to do an essay um to do a piece of writing, you check it afterwards, you hand it in to me, and then suddenly my advice, my video feedback coming back to you is um picking up all these little mistakes, these kind of little basic errors, and you're there thinking, oh my god, how did I miss that? I checked my writing over and over, like three times. I can't believe I missed that mistake. Um, how can I fix this? Okay, this this is the question. This is what we're gonna talk about today is how can we notice mistakes when we're writing, and how can we fix these during an exam? Okay, so first off, I want to talk to you a little bit about why. Why are you making these mistakes and why are you not noticing them? So the first thing reason comes when we're writing in general, because everything that we're writing on nowadays has auto-correct, even your WhatsApp, like even your Instagram, even my Zoom chat has correction in it. Okay, so and of course, our Word documents, we've been grow we've grown up with these little red and blue lines, okay? But the thing is, when these little red and blue lines appear, what we do is we and I like I'm guilty of this. Uh, I'm I'm bad at spelling because of this, because I grew up with this. Um instead of looking at the thing with a red line, we're like, oh, it's spelled incorrectly, instead of like deleting it and trying again, deleting it and trying again, actually making our brain work, we just hover the mouse, the cursor, over the red line. It tells us what the correction is, and we just press click and it automatically corrects us for us. No brain energy, and we don't learn anything. When we do that, we just make the same mistake over and over again, and we know that auto-correct is going to correct it for us. Um, and that kind of trains our brain to just keep making the same mistake. Like I used to I used to always spell um when I was a teenager, I used to always spell business wrong. It's one of the common words that native speakers have problems with. I used to spell the word business wrong, and it took me years to to fix it because of that, because it automatically auto-corrected for me. Um, so this can be one common reason that we're making little mistakes, spelling mistakes. The same with the blue lines with the grammar. I think that's almost worse to an extent because it tells you that we're making grammatical errors. It gives us loads of information about what we could potentially go away and practice and improve on, but we just click and uh and uh change it uh automatically, auto autocorrect it, and we don't practice that thing. Um, I can tell you with my Spanish that the lines that come up with my Spanish are, and these again are really basic errors that at a C1 level of Spanish I should not be making, but I find it really difficult to see these because I was guilty of doing this. Okay, so have a guess. See if you can guess what my mistakes were. First mistake was with um, so my red, my red line, my spelling mistakes was with the tilde tilde, that little line that goes above letters, like the letter E, for example, for stress marking. Terrible at that. Um, I make mistakes all the time with that. But the silly grammar mistake that I make is with masculine and feminine. So, for example, if the noun in Spanish, if the noun is masculine, the adjective also has to be masculine or feminine or vice versa. So I would often forget to change the adjective ending. Or with irregular words like uh agua, I would put la agua instead of el uh things like that. So I would constantly make mistakes of that and I would read it back and be like, oh my god, Cheryl, how did you make that mistake? Okay. Um number one thing that we want to to look at is how to how to write without relying on autocorrect, which we'll look at in a second, okay? But this is the first reason that we make mistakes when we're writing. Second reason is just how our brain works. So I don't know if you've ever done those those things on on Instagram where they um they show you a picture of a sentence, and none of the words are actual words in the sentence, but you can perfectly read the sentence. Like the word the T-H-E is spelt T-E-H. The letters are in different orders, right? But you can still read them, okay. Um, or if you have the word recommend, you've missed the letter M. You've missed one of the M's, okay? But you can still read it and you can still understand it perfectly. Okay, so what our brain is doing here is what is causing us issues when we check our writing. Because the thing is is that when uh you're reading something, your brain isn't reading word by word, letter by letter, every single word. That would take forever. Your brain is a super fast computer, super fast machine. So often what your brain is doing is predicting the information that's going to come next. If you read a lot in English, then you're going to start recognizing familiar word patterns very quickly. So your brain can often be finishing the sentence before you've even got there. Okay. This is what helps us be uh get faster at reading. Now your brain is using the shape of the word, words again that you're very familiar with, like because and um shop, bread, simple things that have familiar spelling for you and familiar spelling patterns, and your brain is just predicting what that word is without having to read the whole thing very carefully. And generally, if the first letter and the last letter of the word are correct, if something in the middle is flipped or missed out, then that is something that your brain finds easier to just ignore and forget about or not even see. It just changes it automatically for you. Um whereas if the mistake is at the beginning or the end of the word, then your brain is more likely to catch that mistake and see that mistake. The thing is, what's more annoying, is it's even harder to spot mistakes in your own writing because you already know what you want to say. Uh, your brain has an intended sentence in your head. So what is on the page is what you expected to write. So, and there's been studies about that, uh, about this, many, many studies about this. So, this is why it's often easier for your teacher or for me to see the mistakes because I didn't write the thing. I don't know what you intended to say. But when you're correcting something, because you know what you wanted to say, your brain often changes it automatically. It's like your brain is kind of being lazy, but in a clever way. It doesn't read every letter, it uses the context and the memory and what you had in your head to make the reading faster. But the bad thing about this is in exams and proofreading, it means we can miss really obvious mistakes. Especially, especially, especially if it's in our own writing. Okay, so how can we fix this? So, number one, connected to our autocorrect. Okay. Number one, if you're writing in English, if you're writing on Microsoft Word, number one thing to do is turn off spell check and grammar check. Turn it off so that there are no red or blue lines distracting you. Okay, turn it off. Do your piece of writing without any of that help. Okay, do your piece of writing. Step two, check it. Okay, check it and see for yourself. Can you see any mistakes? Once you've done that yourself and you're happy with it, you've checked all your mistakes. Step three, turn on the auto-correct again and see if any blue or red lines still come up. The brute the blue and red lines that still come up are either going to be things that you have common uh spelling problems with, or you have common grammatical issues with, and you need to make notes of these. This is key. Do not just auto-correct them. You need to make notes of those things so that you can go away and work on those things. Have a list at the back of your notebook of words that you commonly misspell. If it's a grammar point, or perhaps it's kind of punctuation with commas or semicolons or sentence construction, make a note of that so that you can work on that and improve that before your next piece of writing. Okay? As I always say, with anything that you do, make sure you analyze it afterwards so that you can fix and improve those things before you do the next thing. Because if you just keep writing essay after essay after essay and autocorrecting, you'll never improve because you're gonna make the same mistakes over and over and over. And this is true for every single part of the exam. Okay, always analyze, always fix before you do a task again. Okay. So this is our first thing that we can do, okay? Turn off autocorrect, check it yourself first, turn it back on again. Anything is left are the things that you need to work on. Step number two is how can we get better when autocorrect is off? How can we get better at checking? How can we notice those mistakes? Okay, so I'm gonna give you a checklist of what we can do to work on this. Okay, number one, we want to leave about five minutes at the end of your writing task to check your writing. Okay, so if you're writing an essay, it's 45 minutes. We want to spend five minutes planning, five minutes proof proofreading at the end. Okay, so then you've got about 30-35 minutes to do the actual writing. Okay. This five minutes for proofreading at the end is not for completely changing all your ideas or rewriting whole paragraphs. Okay, this five minutes of proofreading is for checking our grammar, our vocabulary, and making sure that we've answered the question. Okay. The reason we're not gonna make massive changes is one, we're not gonna have time at the end of the exam. And two, if you've done your planning stage, you're not gonna you're not gonna need to do that. Okay, so step one should really be always plan your writing before you begin. Don't just go straight in and write it, because that's when things are not gonna make some sense and not gonna be in a logical order, okay? Plan, plan, plan. Okay, so we've got our five minutes at the end. The three things that we are going to be checking is number one, have I answered the question and is it in the correct register? So have I answered the question and is it if it's an essay, is it formal throughout? If it's an informal letter, is it informal throughout? Okay. Number two, grammar. Number three, vocabulary and spelling. I don't want you to check these things all at the same time. Okay? Read it three times. First time you read it, and this will take a minute. Just check you've answered the question. You've dealt with everything that was in the question that was asked you. For example, if it's an essay, have I said which point is most important at the end? Am I answering the question that was asked? You would be surprised how many people do not do this and lose their points for content. So always do this. I'll take you a minute. Number two, read it again, this time only for grammar, checking for any grammatical errors, like me with my masculine and feminine nouns. Okay. And then finally, the third time, we're gonna read it to check our vocabulary and spelling. Okay. Key tip here, especially for the vocabulary and spelling bit. Okay, well, potentially for the grammar as well. Okay. So the first time, when we're reading it, we're reading it through quickly to check we've answered the question. The second and third time, do not read it from top to bottom. Okay? Because our brain, as we know, uh starts uh starts tricking, uh tricking our mind, and it starts not being able to see spelling mistakes or not being able to see grammatical mistakes because it knew what it wanted to say and it starts reading it like that. Okay, so to stop our brain doing that, what I want you to do is read it backwards, because that's gonna take away the content, uh, sorry, the context of the the sentence and the the paragraph. So it's gonna give your brain less opportunity to automatically um to uh to automatically I've forgotten the word that I was gonna say. Um my mind has gone blank. What's the word I want to say? Uh to automatically predict uh information. Okay. So we're gonna read it backwards. Okay. Uh so start with the last sentence, read the last sentence, and then move upwards. Okay, so this stops your brain helping, uh helping in air quotes and correcting things automatically. Okay. When we're send when we're checking the sentence for grammar, checking, do we have a subject? Do we have a verb? Do we have an object? Is a sentence an appropriate length? It's not too long. If we joined two sentences together, are we using commas appropriately? Have we got the articles, the or a? Is it singular or plural? Is the verb um connecting to the noun? Okay, those are all the things you want to be thinking about when you're looking at the sentence from a grammar point of view. And finally, you want to check your own kind of personal danger list, the thing that you know that you make mistakes with. So for me, when I'm checking, I know that because of when I did because when I did the the autocorrect, the blue-red line test earlier, I know what the common mistakes are that I make. I know what my danger list is, which is the tildes and the masculine and feminine. So that's going to be something that I'm gonna have on high alert when I'm testing. For you, it could be. Maybe, for example, I have a lot of Polish students who have trouble with articles, ah and the because it doesn't exist in that language. So for them, that would be on the danger list, the things they need to be careful with. I know some people, well, pretty much everyone, uh finds prepositions difficult. So that would be something that I would be double checking. Um for Spanish students, often um there can be issues with uh word order um or missing subjects and sentences, because uh in Spanish you don't need to say the subject when you're speaking, when you're writing, you can just say the verb. So often uh when we're writing, we see errors with missing subjects or word order, uh word order issues, for example, uh with nouns and adjectives, which are in opposite orders in Spanish. So knowing what your personal common errors are and having them on alert when you're writing can really help you focus in on those kind of silly little mistakes that you know, that you know. You know it's he goes and not he goes, you know it's depends on and not depends of, but I hear those mistakes and I see those mistakes written every single day. Okay, so know what your danger list is. Finally, read it out loud in your head. Okay, read it out loud in your head to make sure it makes sense. It kind of again helps you notice any kind of weird word order or something that doesn't sound right. If you're used to speaking, if you're used to saying, uh, for example, many people believe that technology has a positive impact on society, uh, and you've written impact in society, you're gonna spot it when you read it because you've been speaking and you've been saying those things over and over and over and over again uh in, for example, our speaking sessions. Um, so it's gonna help your brain be like, that doesn't sound right. Um, so it can help people who um are maybe better at speaking than writing spot those mistakes. Okay, so lots of little tips there. You don't need to use all of them, but choose the ones that are useful for you and try it out when you do your next piece of writing. This piece of writing could be a mock exam, or it could be just writing you've read um an article in The Guardian and you want to write a little summary paragraph about it. Just practice doing it. The more you write, the better you're going to get at it if you analyze your mistakes in between so that you don't make them again. Okay? I hope you find that valuable. Let me know in the comments if you did, and I will see you after the summer break.