When I write for public consumption (book, magazine article, blog post....), I try to be a bit careful with how I present myself. I have the most difficult time with misspellings because they could bite me on the nose and I still wouldn't sense them. I tend to be okay with grammar, and I pick up most typos because usually I read and reread many times before publishing. Some often sneak through anyway.

Part of this carefulness is evident in the first example I give in my book on regular expressions. On the first page (First edition, Chapter 1, Page 1) I describe how regular expressions can be used to identify doubled words:

I first wrote that in 1995 or 1996, and it's survived through to the third edition, where I go on to present solutions in Perl, Java, and even emacs.

Running the program has long been part of the book's build process, to vet the prose for doubled words, but for some reason I never thought to apply it to my blog posts. I thought of it yesterday, and was shocked at the dozens of doubled-word typos I found in the 430ish posts I currently have on my blog. Dozens. I guess it's so easy to read what you believe to be there than what's actually there.

It's mildly interesting to realize that such errors would never make it past a first re-reading if the text were Japanese, because my reading of Japanese does not “flow” like when I read English. When I read Japanese, I read individual words (or at least try to), then put them together to understand the sentence (or at least try to). Thus, I'd immediately notice a misplaced word.... at least to the extent that my Japanese abilities allowed me to realize that it was indeed misplaced. 🙂

Since I was in tidy-up mode, I thought to also run a little utility I'd developed in 1996 but had since forgotten about. It checks for the misuse of “a” and “an” (e.g. “a apple”). This kind of error also crops up often in text subject to a lot of editing.

For example, in my post yesterday about the river in Kibune having a cooling effect, I originally wrote that it had the effect of “an air conditioner,” but at one point during composition I decided to add “natural” in there, and so ended up with “an natural air conditioner.” I didn't notice the glaring grammar error before posting, nor until I ran my little utility that pointed out about a dozen such errors spread across my posts over the last few years. Doh!

The two checks — a vs. an and doubled words — are now part of my pre-post checkup. Hopefully, no more such errors will creep in (leaving room for different errors, no doubt).