Why Can't I Proofread

Sometimes I despair of my proofreading abilities, even though I suspect that I'm actually better than a lot of folks at it. In a piece I was rereading last night for the umpteenth time I discovered that I'd written the word "mediation" where I meant "meditation." How many times I passed over that one I'll never know.

Of course, if that was my only error I might be OK. But I discovered that one major character had different colored eyes in two different places, that I'd changed the eye color for a minor character at one point but failed to change it elsewhere, that I'd described one character's eyes as "jade-black,"(Uhm, hello, jade is typically green," and that I'd written army where I meant navy. Even so, minor errors, you say? But how many times have I been through this piece? A lot, I'll tell you.

And I guess I can also tell you, you'll never catch 'em all. I think sometimes of myself as a perfectionist. In reality I have to admit I'm not even close.