What Is Text Blindness?
As an editor, I almost always encourage my clients to review my work carefully, and to have others on their team look at the content as well. That’s not because I’m not confident — I’ve been in this gig for almost two decades. It’s because my own brain inevitably will start to work against me.
The brain is designed to spot patterns and make predictions. It will fill in gaps based on experience for the sake of efficiency, too. Tht’s y yu can reed a sintence this. It’s a rapid-fire quest for good-enough interpretation for big-picture meaning.
In this context, the more you work with a draft, the more your brain becomes familiar with it. Your brain thinks, “Oh, I’ve already seen this. I don’t have to pay as much attention.” It gets harder and harder to catch mistakes like missing words (did you catch the one above?), as well as spelling, grammar, or punctuation.
This is what professionals in language and publishing refer to as “text blindness.” You can know all the conventions of style or technical accuracy, and at some point, you’ll still simply not see the mistakes right in front of your face.
You might be in a situation where you don’t have anybody else who can read your draft with fresh eyes for you — that’s what I faced while preparing my devotional, Grace in the Grind. In the video below, I outline the four major strategies to still get the draft polished to a professional level:
- covering text as you go to slow yourself down
- printing the text or reading it on a different screen
- changing the font style, size, or color
- taking breaks between editing rounds
So, no, text blindness doesn’t have to stop your progress. But there’s a reason professional publishing houses assign multiple editors and proofreaders to a book — they know that each editor or proofreader is going to spot what the others unintentionally skipped. With that conquer-together approach, the publisher can reach an exceptionally high level of quality and accuracy with solid consistency. When the help is available to you, always take it.