I didn’t even recognize my own writing. The editor had sent me the proof of my book review – and mind you, this is a book review for a journal in the UK – and the beginning of the proof started with the end of someone else’s book review, which is pretty typical. But when it got to my review, and I casually skipped over the title of the book, I began to read the text proper. I saw the word “programme” and believed I was reading someone else’s text. But it was interesting, so I kept reading. It sounded like work from my field, so I got a few sentences in before I even realized it was my own work. “Oh, wow, the editor must have rewritten a few of my sentences. I thought I wrote a decent piece.” I kept reading. Then I realized … this was all me. Nothing was changed. Nothing at all, except the endings of words and the “ou”s instead of us. It was me, myself, and I, written in British English instead of American Standard English.
I pulled up my submitted copy, and sure enough, there wasn’t a single textual change other than these “accents” on my writing. I just sounded so different in my head, while I was reading, that I didn’t even hear myself.
The rest of this text in this post is merely placeholder text. I have not yet written this blog post, but by the summer of 2021, it will all be here.
I will put all my text here. This is really just a lot of text so that I can continue writing text and it will look like a blog post. More text to fill space. This is really just a lot of text so that I can continue writing text and it will look like a blog post. More text to fill space. This is really just a lot of text so that I can continue writing text and it will look like a blog post. More text to fill space. This is really just a lot of text so that I can continue writing text and it will look like a blog post. More text to fill space. This is really just a lot of text so that I can continue writing text and it will look like a blog post. More text to fill space. This is really just a lot of text so that I can continue writing text and it will look like a blog post. More text to fill space. This is really just a lot of text so that I can continue writing text and it will look like a blog post. More text to fill space. This is really just a lot of text so that I can continue writing text and it will look like a blog post. More text to fill space. This is really just a lot of text so that I can continue writing text and it will look like a blog post. More text to fill space.
