Editing

If you've ever written a paper—and let's face it, who above the age of 8 hasn't—you've probably already realized that editing your own work can be a lot like eating sand. This is because editing requires you to take a step back and look at your own writing objectively, something extremely difficult to do when you are attached to what you wrote. As a result, you've probably come to depend on today's automatic spelling and grammar checkers for most of your editing needs. The problem is that these features, while they are great, are not without their flaws. "What flaws?" you might ask.

Here's an example. Let's say that a researcher wrote a letter to decline an award that really should have gone to his partner. The excerpt below sounds perfectly reasonable, and your computer's grammar and spell checker doesn't say that anything's wrong, does it? Well, there may still be some problems...