How do you find typos and missing words?
Editing grammar for accuracy
[An earlier version of this article was published in February 2024.]
The Short Story
Typos and missing words are the first and most obvious kind of error to hunt for. But don’t trust yourself to find them all by skimming on a computer screen, especially in your own writing.
The Real(ist) Story
Typos and missing words are the most straightforward errors to catch, and they’re the most obvious to your readers (i.e., the most embarrassing if you miss them).1 Think of hunting typos as the editorial equivalent of hunting trolls—snow trolls in a blizzard, that is. They can be especially tough to see in your own writing. Oh, how well I know this, as an indie author! Your brain likes to fill in the word it knows ought to be in a particular spot—because most folks don’t focus on each individual word they read.
We need new tactics, and maybe additional brains, to even the odds. Finding typos and missing words is one of the best, low-risk uses of the mechanical brain hiding in your word processor. Don’t take spell-check’s word for it,2 of course. Be skeptical. (I find only five to ten percent of suggestions helpful.) But if you can’t get another pair of human eyes on your writing, at least have a look at whatever’s on spell- and grammar-check’s mind.
Reading aloud—even mumbling under my breath to save time—helps immensely with finding these kinds of errors, too, especially missing words. Just be prepared for passersby to stop and ask whether you’re quite all right.
For writing that really matters, like a print book, consider going old-school and printing out a hard copy to read through (or aloud from). The tactile experience of tracking and marking things up with a physical pen is a pleasant change of mode. Morever, a printed manuscript forces your brain to look at the words in a new light, which makes life difficult for those grammatical trolls that prefer to lurk in shadow.
If you balk at the resources required to print a lengthy manuscript, consider the horrific alternative of slaying trees and spilling ink to produce a stack of typo-laden books. One sacrificial hard copy seems noble by comparison.3
If you discover you’ve missed a typo, it’s perfectly natural to groan or grumble. In such moments, remind yourself that it happens to the best of us. You’re only human. Fix it when you can, and search your document for similar instances.4 Then move on—and preferably, send the manuscript to another human being whose trained eye will lend you aid.
Story Time
I produce a blatant typo nearly every time I publish a story snippet. And because I relied only on myself and spell-check when I published my novella Dustsong, it too was printed with this lovely typo:
Like the first, this man carried a pointed stick, but he was clearly younger. as well as rounder and ruddier of face.
I also tracked down a questionable comma, transposed words, a missing word, and a couple of quotation mark errors (because of the font I was proofreading in).
I don’t blame myself too severely for these oversights. Heck, the punctuation typo above was literally small enough, a speck of dust on my screen likely obscured it. In print, though—yuck! I knew I was rolling the proverbial dice by not getting another human editor to check the final manuscript, and it’s a risk I won’t take again.
Godspeed and happy rewriting!
I’d generally lump duplicate words in with typos and missing words, but consecutive instances of the same word are relatively easy to spot yourself. Maybe they awaken the part of our brain that knows how to play word-matching games?
Pun by happenchance.
At the very least, I’m confident we all do worse things.
The “Find” function in word processors. Be wary of “Find and replace,” or especially “Find and replace all.” The latter often requires more delicacy and editorial awareness to avoid creating as many problems as it fixes.