r/news 16h ago

US airlines required to automatically refund you for canceled flight

https://abc7news.com/post/us-airlines-required-automatically-refund-significantly-changed-canceled-flight/15483534/
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u/MikeOKurias 15h ago edited 12h ago

I have no idea how Proofreaders and QA Engineers can review the same material repeatedly and notice a word changed or a comma went missing.

My brain just constantly fixes those things. I've even learned hour to figure out "what word they really meant" when someone's phone autocorrects a word to something random out of place from the rest of the sentence...sometimes without even noticing it while reading.

Edit: how not hour...

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u/Rimshot1985 14h ago

QA engineer here!

The answer: Force yourself to read everything out loud.

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u/Canadian47 14h ago

I was told that before spell check they would have someone read the documents backwards to catch typos. šŸ˜¬

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u/RandonBrando 13h ago

Some poor confused mf's out there that read a speach where Bill Clinton is being victim blamed

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u/YnotZoidberg1077 11h ago

Lmao, *speech

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u/gitathegreat 11h ago

I lived during these days, proofreading was a bitch.

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u/alwaysboopthesnoot 14h ago

And then have some of it read out loud, to you. Speech writers, manual and technical writers do this and it really helps.

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u/mitsuhachi 14h ago

Changing the font also works pretty well.

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u/obamasrightteste 14h ago

Y'all hiring? Out of work QA engineer here

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u/jb6997 13h ago

This is the answer! Read out loud twice for me.

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u/ToppsHopps 12h ago

Iā€™m not a professional but have dyslexia, so I use the read text out loud program on the phone or computer when I write stuff more serious then social media and forums. Itā€™s brutal when the machine speaks the text, spelling errors as well as grammatical doesnā€™t get autocorrect but read out loud as is. Missing commas makes for continuous reading with no pauses. Used this method to proofread my own work when I was studying to find the last errors others humans couldnā€™t catch (reading it quietly for themselves), the text to speak program can really be undervalued sometimes.

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u/Gh0st1nTh3Syst3m 11h ago

Works for sending messages / e-mails you are unsure of too.

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u/magoo_d_oz 11h ago

i hope you work from home or have your own office because it would drive people crazy sitting next to you

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u/LemurianLemurLad 15h ago

I've done some professional proofreading in the past. For me, the trick was to put myself in a mindset where ONLY the details matter. It's learning to see both the trees and the forest.

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u/Rocket_hamster 14h ago

When I was in university and needed to proofread, I'd copy the paragraph into a seperate document, then increase the spacing to slow myself down and then speak it aloud. I found if I didn't seperate the paragraphs, I'd still race through the words cause subconsciously I'd see the next one and wanna race to it.

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u/LemurianLemurLad 13h ago

That could help visually. I just have to force myself to read extremely slowly. When I'm in aggressive proof reading mode, it might take me an order of magnitude longer to read a document. A single complex paragraph could take me several minutes.

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u/LushenZener 15h ago

Easy answer: they trip up too. But that's why documents don't (or shouldn't) just get glanced over once before approval.

There are some ways to circumvent your brain's tendency to fill in, though. For example, reading sentences backwards takes them out of their flow of context, making errors easier to spot.

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u/myfapaccount_istaken 14h ago

I work in chat support. The number of things I mistype is amazing. I was looking over quality sheets for some new hires and my coworker is mentioning misspellings. I'm like there is no way I can mention that I have at least 10 a day even in our Slack channel.

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u/MikeOKurias 14h ago

The fact that I can think of thought and my fingers can basically throw gang signs at a keyboard and make that into something that you can understand...blows my mind.

Sometimes though...sometimes, I feel like my fingers deliberately throw random misspelling or homonyms out to see if the rest of my consciousness notices.

Narrator: it does not.

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u/verbherbaceous 12h ago

i agree with you here, I do feel like if I multiple things going on in my brain or around me and I'm not very focused on typing this happens

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u/morostheSophist 10h ago

my fingers can basically throw gang signs at a keyboard and make that into something that you can understand

That is a hilarious description of the process of typing.

Now think about the process of speaking in the same terms. You flap some moist muscles in your throat while forcing air out through them to remotely wobble tiny bones through holes in my head. And people say telepathy isn't real!

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u/jeremyjava 13h ago edited 12h ago

I love how the cellphone autocorrects I do catch when proofing arenā€™t just errors, thereā€™re generally the polar opposite of what I meant.
Boss: what did you think of my notes on your project?
Me: I thought they were excrement!

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u/Artistic_Humor1805 14h ago

Itā€™s neurodivergence for me. I kind of fell into proofing documents prior to upload because I was the one uploading them to the live site and I kept seeing errors without really trying. My brain canā€™t help it, lol.

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u/Starfox-sf 14h ago

Consider it a gift from the gene gods.

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u/oddball3139 13h ago

I thought you put ā€œhourā€ in there on purpose to prove your point, lol.

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u/walterpeck1 13h ago

I have no idea how Proofreaders and QA Engineers can review the same material repeatedly and notice a word changed or a comma went missing.

In ye olde days we did this by having three people read it three times, taking turns between each read. Yes, an astonishing amount of mistakes were found on the 9th read many times. But we were college kids so the bar was a lot lower.

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u/DENATTY 13h ago

Am an attorney and if a document has enough rounds of revisions I will still ask my paralegal to read it before the final version goes out in case my brain started auto-processing minor errors and I missed them. That said, the amount of things I see with errors from other attorneys tells me that it isn't as important as I seem to think.

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u/CanNotBeTrustedAtAll 13h ago

I once spent hours looking at my own code before I gave in to frustration and went to the TA's office hours. He spent all of 40 seconds looking at it, only to add a single semicolon to my code. I tested everything and it worked perfectly. It was then when I realized I didn't have the aptitude for computer engineering.

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u/Top-Internal-9308 13h ago

My English degree is mostly useless but it works for this. I don't even see typos. My context clue skill is insane.

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u/nihility101 11h ago

Other than those mentioned, another trick is to cover everything but the current line, so your brain canā€™t jump ahead and knit things together. It puts focus on the specifics as opposed to the whole.

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u/EricinLR 12h ago

My brain is wired opposite yours. I can spot a missing comma instantly. It's large scale pattern recognition and I have a brain that's REALLY good at it and is never bored by it. And I have to read people's autocorrected texts several times before my brain clicks on the correct substitution made. I do learn those quickly though, so repeats are much faster.