12.3 PROOFREADING YOUR REVISIONS
Word processors have greatly improved the quality of written documents, but they are also responsible for a new type of editing error. In the past, when a writer revised a document, someone had to type the whole thing over again, and so it was fairly easy to substitute the new words and to leave the old words out.
Now, with the constant editing that word processors allow, it is not uncommon to see both old and new versions of a phrase within a document: The writer typed the new phrase and forgot to delete the old one. Furthermore, writers who carelessly use the Find and Replace feature frequently find sentences like this in their writing:
BAD EXAMPLE On Saturday, the Mr. Johnson returned home.
The best way to avoid these types of errors is, once again, to focus your proofreading on different problems at different times. After each round of edits, print out the hard copy and highlight the words, lines, or paragraphs in which edits occurred. Read those sections in isolation, so that you don’t get caught up in the meaning of the words. In addition, never use the Replace All feature; doing so causes mistakes like the one shown above because it’s difficult to envision all of the contexts in which a word or phrase might appear. Instead, look at each use of the word you are replacing to avoid mistakes.