Why you need a human as part of your editorial safeguards. Is it curtesy or courtesy? Waved or waived? Entails or entrails? I know!

🔤 Your spellcheck does not know it.

🤑 Your paid-for grammar software does not know it either.

🤓 But I do.

Some #proofreading spots from a couple of indie author manuscripts which would have passed unnoticed without #EagleEyedCherry:

❌ It was an appropriate measure and a proper curtesy to my friend. ➡ courtesy ✔

❌ He waved the fee. ➡ waived ✔

❌ I searched through the entails of my bag. ➡ entrails ✔

These were not flagged by my spellcheck or the grammar software add-in installed on my PC. To all intents and purposes, these look OK because:

💡 ‘Curtesy’ is a noun so it doesn’t look out of place after ‘a proper…’ (Different to curtsey/curtsy – also nouns 😅)

💡 To ‘wave’ is a verb, but so, too, is to ‘waive’, hence the computer didn’t know any better.

💡 ‘Entails’ can be a noun as a plural of ‘entail’ (in the legal sense), so it does not look out of place following the determiner ‘the’.

But, of course, we were after ‘courtesy’, ‘waived’ and ‘entrails’.

And, I don’t believe it was a case of the writers not knowing the difference. I’m sure they did. These are most likely typos – a case of a letter missing from each word.

And, I’m sure that the writers read their work back and did the appropriate checks. The problem is, we read what we think is there not what is actually there.

💻 So, we use programs and software to mitigate problems.

🔎 But, whatever we use, there are always things that are missed without the human eye. Without the human understanding of context and nuance.

👩 Add a human into your editorial safeguards.

Me!