Can't be the only one right?

ransomwarelettuce@lemmy.world to Showerthoughts@lemmy.world – 88 points –

So I created this blog from scratch, and after posting my first article I noticed something.

I suffer from post-Post clarity

I have noticied before when posting random bullshit online, but holy shit, now having to write longer stuff, it's clear as day.

As soon as I press the publish button even after re-reading the whole thing, everywhere I look is spelling/grammar mistakes and stupid takes.

How in hell does this happen?

Anyways as a proof of concept any edit will be in comment thread.

37

Proofreading and editing is a necessary part of writing. And there's never enough.

... noticied ...

fuuuuuck . . .

To be clear, I wasn't casting aspersions on you personally. There's literally never enough proofreading or editing, for anyone. I was just taking a present example.

I have a habit of editing my comments 10 seconds after writing them, too

Why edit a draft when you can edit a live shit post?!

When I write important work-related emails, after I've finished writing I leave it open without hitting send, then go make myself a coffee or something completely unrelated to clear my head.

When I return, I re-read what I wrote and often find things that were written ambiguously, incorrectly, or outright weirdly. And with a myriad of spelling and grammar mistakes. Often I find that I forgot to include important points or information.

This gives me an opportunity to proofread before hitting send with semi-fresh eyes.

On lemmy, on the other hand, I find myself editing my own comment right after posting.

I wait to fill the recipient box until after it's edited.

Proof read it backwards, one sentence at a time. When you read it forwards, your brain already knows what should be there, so it skips over a lot.

Also, just use a word processor to write it, and let it do the grunt work of spelling and grammar checking for you.

You can look at the git logs for any open-source project if you want to feel better about it: there's usually a regular pattern of:
do this for all the things.
Followed by either:
hang on, wait. Not *all* the things.
Or:
Missed these out of all the things

Yeah . . . many of my commits are just to fix typos.

In case you don't know, you can do an interactive rebase and amend any past commit, not only the latest.

If the commits were already pushed to a remote, you can still do it but need to add --force or --force-with-lease to your next git push to make it overwrite the remote branch.

I think it's because our brain can't really focus on both content and spelling at the same time. You can only really check either the message or the spelling at one time when you are the author.

When you check the message/content of your post, you look at every sentence and ask yourself: does it convey my point? Did I choose the right words?

When you check spelling, you should check word by word without looking at the meaning(unless spelling depends on it). Since you know what's coming next in your story, you're probably just rushing through the sentences. You'll miss stuff because you don't read every word. It is the classic "the the" problem where the same word is shown twice in a sentence, but you miss it because you only fastread it.

Also, spell check last. If you spellcheck first and then do some rewriting, the new stuff will have a high chance of spelling errors.

Yeah, I usually take a long time to type mine out, rephrase it, take out things that might be too offensive, add to what wasn't offensive enough, and then submit my masterpiece.

Only to immediately go back and change all the auto correct typos and fix punctuation.

I believe that's called perfectionism and imposter syndrome. Just remember it's a story in your head and don't give it more credence than it deserves.

Don’t worry. AI will slave eberything.

I will never not read "AI" as "Al"(with an L) . Makes it more goofy, so less scary.

My post-post clarity is when I look at what I just posted and find a bunch of typos that I had overlooked at least three times.

Nope, you're not alone. I sometimes write a lengthy reply, read it, reread it, and before I get sucked into that overthinking loop, press "post" and go do something else.

I then find myself returning to my reply and re-reading it, often catching mistakes in spelling, grammar, or worse, in how I stated or presented my idea. That's why a lot of my replies end up being edited after the fact, with a note saying why I felt I had to edit my response.

I do the same thing, but always have some raging troll up my ass who claims I'm trying to bait them with edits...

Like...fucking dude, why do you check your replies every 15 seconds?!