Following a teaching career of over forty years, I have recently retired from academia. I loved teaching, utterly enjoying advanced composition classes in particular. One advice of my dramatic emphasis was “proofreading”. Each of my countless students heard me say that there must be at least two days of what I called a cooling time: Between the day they thought their writing assignment was complete and the actual submission deadline of their work. The rationale behind my emphatic stress on this “sleep on it”-period was obvious to me, and I always wanted to make sure that my students also came to terms with it: Far fewer surface errors.
When we are in the heat of the moment of writing creatively, we tend to see punctuation, spelling, capitalization and grammar through rose colored glasses. Once we allow ourselves to re-visit what we have written -after we slept on it (preferably, for one week at least), those glasses will begin to display a different shade. We then will be cool-headed enough to see our work more realistically. And: We will adjust / modify / correct the mistakes that seemed non-existent at the initial onset of our writing endeavor. One step at a time . . . toward a streamlined / polished version of that first crucial draft.
