Spotting mistakes after hitting publish is a journalist’s nightmare. Here, veteran journalists share tips for catching errors when writing news stories.
Journalists make publishing mistakes not necessarily because they are careless, but also because the brain reads what it meant to write rather than what is on the page.
The following proven techniques — from print, broadcast, and digital news professions — set out ways for spotting errors before your audience does.
Second pair of eyes
Most journalists need a colleague to check what they produce before it goes out. This is sometimes called having ‘a second pair of eyes’ to help catch factual slips, grammatical errors, and spelling mistakes that the writer almost always misses. This is not a failing — it is simply how the brain works.
The problem is that when you write something, you already know what you meant to say.
So when you read it back, your brain quietly fills in the gaps, smooths over the rough edges, and shows you the article you intended rather than the one that’s actually on the page. The errors are there. Your brain is just choosing not to see them.
As more journalists work alone — filing remotely, freelancing, running their own platforms — the safety net of the sub-editor or news editor, is gone. The responsibility for accuracy and clarity falls entirely on the writer. That makes it worth developing some disciplined habits.
Below are approaches that working journalists and editors have found genuinely useful, along with some additional techniques worth considering.
Getting sloppy with copy
I write a lot on the move. The copy always looks fine when I write it, but once it’s published I regularly spot silly mistakes — a missing word, a repeated phrase, a name that’s been misspelled. Perhaps it’s because I write quickly; perhaps it’s because I touch-type at speed. Others have told me they have exactly the same problem.
When I was a newspaper journalist, I relied heavily on the news editor and the subs to catch what I missed — probably too much. In those days corrections were accompanied by peer group humiliation as the errors were announced to the whole newsroom in a loud voice by the person checking the copy.
Moving into radio and then TV made things worse. If you’re voicing a script you wrote yourself, the spelling hardly matters, and careless habits can quietly take hold. By the time I was writing for the web — without anyone to check my work — those habits had become a liability.
So I asked former colleagues how they dealt with the issue. Their answers, which they generously shared, were so good that I thought they were worth publishing here in case they might be helpful for others.
The core approaches
Three techniques came up repeatedly, from journalists with very different backgrounds. They are worth treating as a starting point rather than a checklist:
- Fool the brain: Change the way the text looks so that you are forced to read it afresh rather than skim what you think is there.
- Break the narrative pull: Read from the bottom upwards, or paragraph by paragraph in reverse, so you are evaluating language rather than following a story.
- Read it aloud: Slowly, and ideally from a printed copy. Your ear will catch what your eye misses.
Fool your brain
Terry O’Connor, a former print, online, and freelance journalist and trainer, put it well:
“Since we journalists cannot (normally) put our work aside for a time and then re-read it, we miss the ‘stranger’s eye’ that’s essential for picking up mistakes. Our eyes might see the mistakes but our brain interprets what the eye sees as whatever we intended to write. So it’s time to fool the brain by presenting the material in an unfamiliar way, thereby forcing it to see it as a stranger would. If you have time, print the article and re-read it. If you don’t have time or paper, change the screen resolution, page width, text colour, background colour, or all of these. If I’m in a real hurry I just select all, make the text white and the background black. This forces the brain to work as a stranger and you’ll be surprised what you can pick up.”
This works because errors tend to hide in familiarity. The moment the text looks different — different font, different size, different colour scheme, even a different device — your brain loses the shortcut it has been using and has to actually read the words.
Change the medium
If you wrote on a laptop, read the final version on your phone. If you drafted in a word processor, paste it into a plain-text editor. Even moving from a wide screen to a narrow one forces different line breaks, which disrupts the visual pattern your brain has memorised and makes errors visible.
Read your material out of context
Phil Harding, journalist, media consultant, and former director of news at the BBC World Service, doesn’t claim a foolproof method, but his approach echoes Terry O’Connor’s core principle — make the brain work differently:
“Leave it overnight – print it out if you can – changing the font – read the paragraphs in reverse order (part of the trick is not to get caught up in the narrative) – and read it out loudly and slowly.”
Reading paragraphs in reverse order is more powerful than it sounds. When you read from the top, you follow the argument and your brain anticipates what comes next — which means it tends to see what should be there rather than what is. Reading from the bottom breaks that entirely. Each paragraph is evaluated in isolation, which makes clumsy sentences, missing words, and weak logic much harder to miss.
Use a ruler or blank sheet of paper
When reading a printed copy, cover everything below the line you are checking. This prevents your eye from racing ahead and forces you to read word by word. Proofreaders have used this technique for decades, and it remains one of the most reliable methods available.
Enlist a trusted colleague
Nick Raistrick, a media development specialist, agrees with reading aloud but is candid about the limits of self-editing:
“I enlarge my copy using a massive font, close everything else on my desktop, and then read it out loud. I seem unable to sub my own work at all, which is embarrassing as I’m so careful with other people’s copy. I’ve developed an informal network of subs who I sometimes send things to. This is not always practical as deadlines are looming.”
That honesty is instructive. Being a careful, experienced editor of other people’s work does not make you a reliable editor of your own — in fact, the confidence that comes with experience can make you less careful with yourself. The informal network Nick describes is worth cultivating deliberately. Even an occasional exchange with one trusted colleague — you check my piece, I’ll check yours — provides a genuine outside perspective that no amount of self-review can fully replicate.
Read for one thing at a time
Rather than doing a single read-through hoping to catch everything, do separate passes with a specific focus each time. One pass for facts and names. One for grammar and punctuation. One for sense and logic. One for spelling. Trying to check everything simultaneously means you tend to catch very little.
Look out for sentences that don’t make sense
Bob Doran, former senior BBC journalist and now media consultant and trainer, is a firm advocate of reading aloud — and his example is hard to forget:
“I always recommend reading your story aloud. Sometimes a piece can look fine on the screen; it’s only when you read it aloud that you spot the absurdities. I remember listening to a radio news story which began: ‘A man has died after being shot outside a concert by Madonna.’ The writer meant to say that Madonna was giving the concert. When it was read out loud, it sounded like she’d pulled the trigger. Read it aloud yourself and you’ll see. This approach is particularly useful for radio and television scripts. If your sentences are hard to read because they’re too long or too wordy, you’ll know they won’t work on air.”
That example — a classic dangling modifier — illustrates something important. The error is not a typo or a misspelling; it is a structural problem that spell-checkers and grammar tools will not flag. The sentence is grammatically defensible. It is just wrong. Reading aloud catches this class of mistake because when you speak the words, you hear the meaning rather than see it — and the meaning, in that case, is absurd.
Check every proper noun individually
Names of people, organisations, places, and titles are the most common source of factual error in published journalism, and they are the hardest to catch on a general read-through because the brain recognises the shape of a familiar name without registering whether the letters are quite right. Go through the copy and check every proper noun separately, ideally against a primary source.
Walk away, if you can, and return to the text later
Catherine Kustanczy, reporter and freelance broadcaster, keeps it simple:
“Walk away for a day, an hour, it doesn’t matter. Then come back. Read it once. Read it again, out loud. Always works for me.”
Naomi Goldsmith, a journalism trainer at the BBC World Service Trust, agrees that making the copy look unfamiliar is the key:
“I change the look of the copy. I generally change the font style, make the size larger and print it out to read. The secret is to make it look unfamiliar.”
Distance — whether in time or appearance — is the common thread running through almost every approach here. The more removed you are from the act of writing, the more clearly you can read what you actually produced.
The practical reality, of course, is that deadlines rarely allow for an overnight pause. But even 10 minutes away from the screen — making a cup of tea, taking a call, doing something unrelated — provides a small reset.
A note on tools
- Spell-checkers: These are useful but limited. They will catch “teh” but not “their” used in place of “there.” Grammar checkers have improved, but they regularly miss context-dependent errors, and sometimes flag correct usage as wrong. Neither is a substitute for a careful human read.
- Text-to-speech tools: These are built into most operating systems and available as browser extensions — offer a useful variation on the read-aloud technique: the computer reads the text to you while you follow along. Because you are listening rather than speaking, you cannot unconsciously correct as you go, which makes it easier to hear what is actually written.
- Artificial Intelligence: AI writing assistants can also play a useful role. Pasting your copy into a tool such as Claude, Perplexity, or Gemini then asking them to check for errors, ambiguities, or sentences that could be misread, will often surface problems that spell-checkers miss — including the kind of structural confusion that Bob Doran’s Madonna example above illustrates. AI tools are particularly good at flagging any unclear order of events, tangled syntax, and unintentional double meanings. That said, they are not infallible. They can miss errors, introduce new ones, and occasionally correct something that was right to begin with.
Important
Treat the output from AI as a prompt for your own judgement, not a final verdict. These tools are aids, not editors. Use them as part of the process, not instead of it.
The underlying principle
Every technique described here is a variation on the same insight: you cannot reliably proofread something you wrote, in the form you wrote it, immediately after writing it. The brain that produced the text is too invested in what it was trying to say to read what it actually said.
The solution is disruption — of the visual presentation, the reading order, the medium, the time elapsed, or the person doing the reading. Any of these makes the familiar strange enough to see clearly. The more of them you combine, the fewer mistakes make it through.
The errors that embarrass are rarely the ones you couldn’t have caught. They are the ones you didn’t stop to look for.
