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Are you sure you mean that?

A lot of hypnotists use a particular turn of phrase when they’re trying to induce the recall of suppressed memories: it’s this “Hear what you heard, see what you saw”.

Done right it can be a powerful tool. Sadly there’s a third phrase which I’d like to add: read what you wrote.

What do I mean by that? Simply that when you scan back over your presentation, looking for mistakes, checking it for the umpteenth time and so on, you’re likely to be quite board - after all you know your material inside and out.

At that point, of course, you don’t “read what you wrote”. Instead, you “read what you meant to write”.

Authors have long known that they shouldn’t try to rely too much on their own proof-reading. That’s why there are professional proof-readers and editors.

You can’t rely upon your own judgment to spot mistakes in your own slides any more than an professional author would trust their own ability to re-re-re-re-re-read their own words.

You might not be able to afford a professional proof-reader but our advice is clear: swallow any pride you might have about it and ask someone who knows nothing about what you’re trying to say to look over your slides.

It’s important that you get someone who comes to it with a fresh pair of eyes. Critical in fact.

In desperation, send it to us! If you can’t manage that, for whatever reason, try these two simple tricks to increase the chances of you spotting typos and other glitches.

Firstly, read your slides backwards - that way you get rid of any sense of structure or story and you’re more free to look purely at what’s written.

Secondly use a ruler or piece of card under each word in turn to increase the amount you concentrate on it. Better to feel like an idiot doing that kind of thing than to feel like an idiot when the audience spots a mistake you’ve not!

(And if you see any mistakes in this that I’ve not spotted, you know who to tell: sme@curved-vision.co.uk - we simply didn’t have time to follow our own advice! :) )Happy Christmas everyone!

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Ruth Mitchell .