Are you sick of looking at the same passages over and over during rewrites and self-editing? It’s always hard to catch your own mistakes, but this simple brain hack could make these tasks more effective.
Change up your font.
Use something distinctly different–a script, a font designed for dyslexia, or even the illustrious Comic Sans. This change not only breaks up the monotony of looking at your manuscript again and again, it also cues your brain to pay more attention. Science has shown that using a different font, particularly one that is unfamiliar or more difficult to read aids in processing information because it forces you to pay more attention.
In fact, a multidisciplinary team of designers and behavioural scientists at RMIT in Melbourne have created a font called Sans Forgetica based on these findings and offer it as a free download. As writers, we spend much of our lives staring at text, and often reading the same passage over and over, but this little trick is an easy way to get the most out of your self-editing process. Give it a try and see how it works for you.
