Why is it so hard to edit your own work?

Editing your own work is hard. We know this. But why is it so difficult to do? The simple answer is, it's because of the way our brains work.

The human brain, by its very nature, fills in blanks. It doesn't like gaps in our perception of the world. It even goes so far as to fill in the gaps in what we see. There is a natural blind spot in our field of vision, but the brain just makes up what it thinks we'd see there, based on everything else we're seeing. There's even a condition called Charles Bonnet syndrome, where, when someone loses some or all of their vision, they start to experience visual hallucinations because the brain is so desperate to see something instead of nothing. Sometimes people see geometric shapes and patterns, sometimes the images can be as complex as seeing people or landscapes.

Your brain applies the rule to everything, including editing. It fills in the gaps and adds whatever it thinks is most likely to go there. When we read, often we don't actually even read the middle of the word. The eye skips from beginning to end and works out what it thinks the word should be based on the first and last letters, and the context.

The fact of the matter is, we all extrapolate from incomplete information, but we also extrapolate from complete information when there's no need.

This is what makes it so hard to edit your own work. As much as you might think you are paying attention to every single word and picking out every error, you're just too familiar with your own work to edit it effectively. The 'fill in the gaps' effect is even stronger when you're looking at information you wrote, because your brain doesn't even have to guess what should go there, it already knows!

This is why it's always going to be more effective for someone else to edit your work. Someone who is unfamiliar with the text won't be as affected by the 'fill in the gaps' urge. Looking at work we haven't seen before make us consider what is actually there, instead of what we expect to be there. It will always be more effective for someone else to edit your work, but there are ways to make your own efforts more effective, and hopefully minimise the amount of work you need the editor or proofreader to do.

Try double spacing the manuscript, changing the font or colour of the text, or using the 'Read Aloud' function so that you hear the words, rather than just read them. A lot of the time, hearing your work out loud will let you pick out literals (words that aren't misspelled but aren't correct, like form instead of from), and hear whether the punctuation and pacing are correct.

Before you have your work edited, try a couple of those tips to see whether you can make the job simpler for the editor, and hopefully cheaper for you!