Welcome to Before Breakfast, a production of IHeart Radio.

Good morning. This is Laura.

Welcome to the Before Breakfast podcast.

Today's tip is to look with new eyes.

Whenever you are working on something important, try to give it a final

review in a slightly different format than you have reviewed it before. You just might catch

something your old eyes didn't see. No matter how skilled and careful a proofreader you are, you can miss things.

Our brains have a way of reading what was meant instead of what was written.

This comes in handy if you're trying to get the gist of a text a friend dictated while driving,

or if you are reading the letter that your first-grade

nephew wrote you all by himself. But this feature of our brains is not so helpful when we are

looking at something we created, especially if we've been looking at it for a while.

You've read that last paragraph three times. You know what it says. But do you?

I can speak from personal experience with embarrassing typos that no, you do not necessarily know

what it says. Our eyes can glaze over after a while. So the trick to catching errors is to look at whatever we

have created with new eyes. One easy way to do this is to put a little space between your first

review and your final review. A day or more is good, though I know that's not really reasonable

for short things.

But an hour would be nice.

Write that important email before lunch.

Save it as a draft, and then review it after lunch.

Maybe you will see that you repeated the word, the.

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