Cure for Typos

Mignon Fogarty, aka Grammar Girl, has a regular podcast and shortened email version of same. I get them both. Today her email mentioned a quick-and-dirty tip that I've been telling authors for years:

Typo Trouble

A company called TextTrust, which checks websites for spelling errors, ran into some typo trouble in 2006 when it issued a press release detailing the most commonly misspelled words it had found "on the 16 million we pages it has spell-checked over the past year." Whoops! They meant to write "16 million Web pages."

A quick and dirty proofreading tip is to read your work out loud or have your computer's text-to-speech function read the text to you. If people at TextTrust had read their press release out loud, the error (which wouldn't be caught by a spell-checker) would have jumped out at them.