The Proofreading Conundrum

www.wikihow.com/Copyedit-and-Proofread-Written-Work

     Oh my!
     My friend Ara, yes that Ara, called to commend me on the Oud Strings and Mzrabs blog post of yesterday. As he also blogs, hyetimesmusic.com, he also asked a simple and innocent question: “do you proofread before you post.” I responded with, “I take it there were some errors in my post.” He said, “A few.” “Dang, and I proofread it twice.”
     I just went over yesterday’s post and there were a lot of spelling and grammatical errors. I was embarrassed seeing how many there were. I proofread it twice, last evening, before posting it and still the errors got through. I usually proofread all posts twice. I do not like to make errors. After all, my industrial career was rooted in quality management.
     Some of the errors were certainly my bad typing, misspellings, and poor grammar. Others were the fact that I was typing the word “ouds,” the plural of the instrument I play, which kept getting autocorrected to “ours.”
     So, what’s going on?
     There are two things. First, it is harder to proofread one’s own writing than that of someone else. I think there is an underlying belief in my mind that “It is impossible for me to have made any errors.” Thus, when I proofread my own stuff, I might just gloss right over some of the errors.
     The second factors is what I can only call biorhythms. Some days, I can type like the wind, well a gentle breeze, everything flows, and there are very few errors. On these same days, I am an astute and diligent proofreader. On other days, I type like the keyboard is under a layer of mud and I, seemingly, proofread without my reading glasses i.e. in a blurry state.
     What the heck are biorhythms? It is a concept developed by a German physician in the late 1800s that was quite popular in the 1970s here in the US.

According to the theory of biorhythms, a person's life is influenced by rhythmic biological cycles that affect his or her ability in various domains, such as mental, physical and emotional activity. These cycles begin at birth and oscillate in a steady (sine wave) fashion throughout life, and by modeling them mathematically, it is suggested that a person's level of ability in each of these domains can be predicted from day to day. The theory is built on the idea that the biofeedback chemical and hormonal secretion functions within the body could show a sinusoidal behavior over time. Wikipedia

     No one talks about biorhythms anymore. Most scientists do not believe in them. I never believed in them. I believe the theory is nonsense especially if the periodicity is a fixed sine curve set at birth. Hey, they were popular in the 1970s. It was a whacky decade. I am the only person I know that keeps referring to biorhythms these days. I even blogged on them back in 2010: Biorhythms and Mood Rings.
     On the other hand, I do believe there are ebbs and flows in focus, aptitude, and cognition. These ebbs and flows are stochastic both in terms of amplitude and frequency. 

     Let’s see if my proofreading of this post is any improvement.