Sometimes it's better to look at a book,and not read it

Here's a proofreading tip I discovered that should be useful. After you've read your new masterpiece 70 or 183 times, sit a bit farther back from your screen and LOOK at the pages--don't read them.You'll probably be amazed at all of the errors you detect when you are not concerned with content, meaning and story-telling artistry.

I aim my eyes at the three-o'clock position and maker a clockwise scan on each page, but do what works best for you.

Check your book for these bloopers:

1. Wrong fonts, particularly when text is pasted-in from another source
2. Commas that should be periods--and vice-versa
3. Straight punctuation that should be curly "typographers' marks"
4. Curlies that curl in the wrong direction
5. Missing spaces between paragraphs or sections
6. Bad justification in the last line of a page
7. Chopped-off descenders where you decreased line spacing or if the bottom of a text box is too close to the text
8. Wrong-size bullets
9. Rivers
10. Too-big word spacing
11. Normal letters that should be ligatures (more for large type than in body text).
12. Accidental spaces after bullets
13. Improper hyphenation
14. Roman text that should be italic, and vice-versa
15. Ignoring highlighted warnings in MS Word.
16. Automatically accepting MS Word suggestions
17. Gray text that should be black.
18. Insufficient space adjacent to images
19. Images or text boxes that floated over the margin.
20. Images or text boxes that "slid' down and covered up footers
21. Missing periods at sentence ends
22. Missing opening or closing quote marks.
23. Periods that should be inside a closing parentheses--or outside.
24. Repeated words caught by the software
25. Wrong headers, missing headers, switched verso and recto headers
26. Subheads that are too close to the text above and too far from the text below
27. Too much space between lines in a multi-line title, chapter name or subhead
28. Pages with numbers that should not show nunbers ("blind folios")
29. Words that shifted from the bottom of one page to the top of the next page
30. And one that does require reading: chapter names in the table of contents that don't reflect a change made in the actual chapter
31. And another: a topic not in the index because you added something after completing the index